INDUSTRY
What’s new in chemical recycling projects
The chemical recycling industry has had another busy year, with progress made in pilot and production projects and new investments made in Europe, Asia and the Americas
Reflecting changing attitudes, rapidly evolving technology, and a swiftly developing marketplace, the number of chemical recycling projects getting off the ground continues to rise. Amid soaring energy prices, particularly in Europe, one emerging trend is a marked increase in the number of companies and organisations forming partnerships and alliances throughout the value chain to not only share data and resources, but also cut costs and find more economical solutions. Read on for our lowdown on the key developments of 2023. At the turn of the year, Swiss industrial engineer-
ing firm Sulzer Chemtech signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland to commercialise recycling solutions for polystyrene (PS). The system, based on VTT’s patented pyrolysis-based depoly- merisation process and Sulzer Chemtech’s Sure styrene purification technology, aims to make PS a fully circular product by developing a processing train able to convert waste PS into high-purity styrene suitable for producing various grades of
Chemical Recycling – Global Insight 2024
styrenic polymers, including those with food-relat- ed requirements. In February, NextChem acquired a 51% stake in
MyRemono, a newly established company to which fellow Italian company Biorenova has transferred patents, assets, including a demonstration plant, and contracts related to the catalytic depolymerisa- tion technology CatC. CatC is a continuous chemical recycling process to recover monomers with ultra-high levels of purity from sorted plastic waste, particularly polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA). NextChem hope to scale up and industri- alise the technology, which could also be used for PS. The first demonstration plant featuring CatC technology, with a processing capacity of approxi- mately 1,600 tonnes/yr, is operating in the Abruzzo region of Italy where monomer samples have already been validated by prospective off-takers. Elsewhere, Nexus Circular signed a long-term
commercial agreement with petrochemical company Chevron Phillips Chemical for the supply of a “significant volume annually” of circular
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Main image: Groundbreaking at the site in Statesboro, Georgia, US for Revalyu’s first PET chemical recycling facility
IMAGE: REVALYU
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