Chemical recycling, also called advanced recycling, covers technologies that break plastic down to its chemical building blocks instead of simply re-melting it. The main routes are pyrolysis, which turns mixed plastic into oil, gasification, and depolymerisation, which returns polymers such as PET to their monomers.
Its appeal is that it can handle mixed or contaminated waste that mechanical recycling cannot, and the output can match virgin quality. The trade-offs are higher energy use, higher cost and lower yield, and recycled content is usually allocated through mass balance. Most recycled plastic in India and worldwide is still produced mechanically, and the two routes are best seen as complementary.
