Can plastic be turned into fuel?

The three routes at a glance

Temperatures from GAO-21-105317 and EPA’s 2021 notice on pyrolysis and gasification; depolymerization ranges from the peer-reviewed literature cited below.

1. Pyrolysis: plastic to oil

Pyrolysis heats plastic in the absence of oxygen until the long polymer chains crack into smaller hydrocarbons. The GAO describes it as turning plastic waste “into a synthetic crude oil that can be refined into diesel fuel, gasoline, heating oil, or waxes.” It takes heat in rather than giving it off, and EPA notes it can release tars, particulates and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that have to be controlled.

It works best on polyolefins, the plastics in bags, films and many containers. One study pyrolyzed HDPE bags at 400 °C and got up to 47 percent diesel by weight. PET is a poor fit. It is about one-third oxygen by weight, and its pyrolysis oil comes out acidic and viscous, loaded with benzoic and terephthalic acids that collect as solids in pipes and condensers.

Results at commercial scale are debated. A 2024 ProPublica analysis estimated that 100 pounds of plastic waste yields 15 to 20 pounds of reusable plastic through pyrolysis; the American Chemistry Council responded that an industry-wide yield is impossible to estimate. NRDC counted eight chemical recycling plants operating in the U.S. at the start of 2025, seven of them pyrolysis. Brightmark’s Indiana plant was running at about 5 percent of capacity when it filed for bankruptcy in March 2025. Argonne National Laboratory found that diesel from non-recycled plastics could cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 14 percent compared with petroleum diesel.

Regulation is in motion too. In March 2026 EPA asked for comment on removing pyrolysis units from its incinerator rules under the Clean Air Act. As of this writing, no final action has been taken.

2. Gasification: plastic to syngas

Gasification uses more heat and a little oxygen or steam to break plastic all the way down to syngas, a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Syngas can then be made into liquid fuel through the Fischer-Tropsch process or into chemicals. In 2019 Eastman announced it would substitute waste plastic for some of the coal in its Kingsport, Tennessee gasifier, which makes acetyls. EPA’s 2021 assessment said plastic pyrolysis and gasification facilities were “most often operating in a demonstration mode.” Fulcrum BioEnergy’s Sierra plant in Nevada, built to gasify municipal waste into fuel, shut down in 2024.

3. Depolymerization: back to the building blocks

Some plastics, including PET, are held together by bonds that can be cut cleanly. Chemical routes do it with solvents: glycolysis, methanolysis or hydrolysis, at lower temperatures than pyrolysis. Eastman’s methanolysis plant in Kingsport came online in 2024 with capacity for 110,000 metric tons of plastic a year.

Enzymes are the low-temperature version. In 2020 an engineered enzyme broke down at least 90 percent of PET into its monomers in 10 hours, at 72 °C. The GAO notes some enzyme processes run as low as room temperature. Most depolymerization projects aim to make new plastic from the monomers. The first planned commercial-scale enzymatic PET plant, Carbios in France, is still closing its financing. Read more in our guide to plastic-eating enzymes.

Where PlastiBioFuel fits

We use the enzymatic route and point it at fuel instead of new plastic. Our enzyme, held in a porous framework so it can be reused, splits post-consumer PET into its building blocks in warm water, and we convert those building blocks into fuel-grade ethanol. We chose ethanol because the market already exists: the U.S. used 14.3 billion gallons of fuel ethanol in 2025, and most gasoline sold here is about 10 percent ethanol. The breakdown step works on real bottle PET in the lab. Our first reactor is built to demonstrate the full process. See how it works.

The carbon-credit question

Fuel made from plastic is not automatically “renewable” in the regulatory sense. Under the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, renewable fuel must come from renewable biomass, a defined list that does not include fossil-derived plastic. California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard treats plastic as a fossil feedstock. EPA has also said it does not consider converting plastic to fuel to be recycling, although the strategy stating that position is now under review. Any plastic-to-fuel business that depends on credits is betting on rules that don’t exist yet. That’s why our base case is ethanol sales, with credits treated as upside.

How much plastic is there?

EPA’s latest national figures, for 2018, count 35.7 million tons of plastic generated in the U.S. Only 8.7 percent was recycled. About 5.6 million tons were burned for energy and 27 million tons went to landfills.

Common questions

Sources

1. U.S. GAO, Science and Tech Spotlight: Advanced Plastic Recycling, GAO-21-105317
2. U.S. EPA, Potential Future Regulation Addressing Pyrolysis and Gasification Units, 86 FR 50296 (2021)
3. U.S. EPA, 91 FR 13543 (Mar 20, 2026), request for comment on pyrolysis units
4. Vollmer et al., Beyond Mechanical Recycling, Angewandte Chemie (2020)
5. Jia et al., Catalytic Fast Pyrolysis of PET, Polymers (2020), doi:10.3390/polym12030705
6. ProPublica, The Delusion of Advanced Plastic Recycling (2024)
7. NRDC, More Recycling Lies (2025)
8. Benavides et al., Argonne National Laboratory, Fuel (2017)
9. C&EN, Eastman will gasify plastic waste (2019)
10. Tournier et al., Nature (2020), doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2149-4
11. U.S. EIA, Monthly Energy Review, Table 10.3 Fuel Ethanol Overview
12. U.S. EIA, How much ethanol is in gasoline?
13. 40 CFR 80.2, Renewable Fuel Standard definitions
14. CARB, LCFS 2024 Final Statement of Reasons, Appendix C
15. U.S. EPA, National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution (2024)
16. U.S. EPA, Plastics: Material-Specific Data