Pyrolysis Fact Sheet 

Bioplant plans to develop pyrolysis plants in the Manawatū (Fielding), Tairawhiti, and Hokitika.

They promote their technology as a ‘green solution’, ‘clean energy’, ‘sustainable’, and ‘the missing link in the circular economy’. But is it really?

What is pyrolysis?

Simply put, waste materials including plastics are fed into a plant to produce diesel to burn as fuel.

There are good reasons why there are no pyrolysis plants in Europe anymore.  No one wants them. They have a long track record of failing after the first year, leaving councils in debt to the pyrolysis company.

Pyrolysis has nothing to do with a circular economy or zero waste and it threatens the human right to a safe, clean healthy environment.

Pyrolysis

• burns valuable, non-renewable resources
• produces greenhouse gases

Pyrolysis competes with Aotearoa’s renewable energy goal of 100% renewable energy by 2025.

• is inefficient

Most modern incinerators need a constant supply of waste a year and produce substandard fuel

• do nothing to reduce skyrocketing plastics production

They require such huge amounts of waste to keep them going that waste will need to be imported. They do not make plastic out of plastic and they do nothing to discourage plastics production – quite the opposite.

• is expensive to set up and locks communities into a poor investment

They divert precious investment away from far more effective preventative measures like refuse, reuse, and repair systems.

• threatens environmental and human health

The plastics fed into these plants are toxic and so is the fuel they produce, and their solid, gas, and liquid emissions to air, water, and soils.  No plant can stop or remove dioxins forming.  Using mixed municipal waste to ‘feed the beast’ increases toxic outputs.

• does not create more jobs

For every job an incinerator creates, recycling centres create 36 jobs, and reuse activities create 296 jobs.