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Right: Mura Technology’s chemical recycling plant in Teesside, UK, has recently opened
provide feedstock for its ReOil technology. In total, OMV will invest around €170m to build a state-of- the-art facility in Walldürn, Germany. With a planned start-up in 2026, the fully
automated sorting facility developed by Interzero will be capable of processing up to 260,000 tonnes of mixed waste plastics per year. It will recover a polyolefin-rich fraction from a waste stream that currently ends up in thermal recycling, the partners say. A new ReOil plant with a capacity of 16,000 tonnes per year is currently under construction at OMV’s Schwechat site in Austria. OMV is then hoping to build an industrial-scale ReOil plant with a planned capacity of 200,000 tonnes per year. LyondellBasell has given the investment
go-ahead for its MoReTec chemical recycling demonstration plant at its Wesseling site in Germany, which will have an annual capacity of 50,000 tonnes per year following its planned completion at the end of 2025. To support this, LyondellBasell has formed Source One Plastics, a joint venture with 23 Oaks Investments, to build an advanced plastic waste sorting and processing facility in Germany, designed to process the amount of plastic packaging waste generated by approximately 1.3m German citizens per year. In the US, LyondellBasell is a partner with
ExxonMobil and Cyclyx in a project in the Houston area to reprocess and sort post-consumer waste and produce feedstock for both mechanical and chemical recycling. ExxonMobil and LyondellBasell plan to invest $135m in the facility, designed to produce 150,000 tonnes of feedstock following start-up, which is expected in 2024. “This project serves as proof of how significant the need is for custom blended plastics feedstock,” said Joe Vaillancourt, CEO of Cyclyx, when the project was announced in October 2022. “With our capability to accept and process a wide range of waste plastics based on their chemistry profile which we custom blend to the needs of our customers, we are creating a new set of recycling options for difficult-to-recycle waste plastics that today are sent to landfill. Our circularity centres will allow us to make available a much larger amount of waste plastic into usable feedstock than has been possible with the current recycling infrastructure. Additional circularity centres are under considera- tion on the Gulf Coast and other locations.” One of the major polyolefin producers that has
committed to chemical recycling is SABIC, which is working with Plastic Energy on a chemical recycling facility nearing completion in Geleen, Netherlands. In July 2023, the two partners entered an agree- ment with Siemer and Landbell for sorting and
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pre-treatment of mixed post-consumer plastics to be supplied as feedstock to the Geleen facility. The material will come from Siemer’s sorting plant in Vechta, Lower Saxony, Germany. Following an upgrade project, the Vechta plant
can re-sort the fraction of plastic packaging waste classified as low-grade using newly combined technologies and then prepare it for chemical recycling. The partners say the plant has an input capacity of 25,000 tonnes per year and is the first of its kind that can separate dirt, foreign matter and impurities from the low-grade plastic fractions. Once reprocessed, the plastic waste will be
delivered to SABIC and Plastic Energy in Geleen, where it will be converted into pyrolysis oil, called Tacoil, using Plastic Energy’s recycling technology. The Tacoil will then be treated in a newly built SABIC hydrotreater plant, to be subsequently used as alternative feedstock by SABIC to produce its Trucircle certified circular polyolefin products. There have been several other announcements
from smaller chemical recycling companies investing in sorting capacity. In September 2022, Clariter along with BioBTX, Bollegraaf and N+P announced an initiative “to develop Europe’s largest and most advanced plastic waste sorting plant for the chemical recycling industry in Delfzijl, the Netherlands”. This will have a planned process- ing capacity of 350,000 tonnes per annum when it opens in 2025, according to the partners. Chemical recycling company Quantafuel and Eurazeo are involved in a project to build a waste sorting plant in Esbjerg, Denmark, where 160,000 tonnes of annual sorting capacity is being targeted. In addition to the direct investment in feedstock enhancement by chemical recycling companies, there is a growing recognition of the market opportunity for companies in the supply chain. For example, in September recycling groups Grüne
Chemical Recycling – Global Insight 2024
IMAGE: MURA
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