PET | CHEMICAL RECYCLING
Advances in PET depolymerisation
Recycling PET with mechanical technologies is well established, but a number of companies have developed depolymerisation processes as
alternatives.Peter Mapleston reports
Mechanical recycling of PET is already converting post-consumer waste into thousands of tonnes of rPET, including bottle-grade material. But several chemical technology companies are pursuing depolymerisation as a different route, especially for hard-to-recycle PET streams. A few projects are further along this route and are heading towards commercialisation in the next couple of years. Carbios, which has developed an enzymatic
recycling technology (C-Zyme) for depolymerising PET using hydrolysis, brought its first demonstration plant onstream in September. The plant includes a 20 m3
process design package which will be used to license the technology. “We will also build and operate a 40,000-tonnes
depolymerisation reactor capable of process-
ing 2 tonnes of PET per cycle, which is the equivalent of 100,000 bottles. It is co-located with a Michelin tyre production plant in Clermont-Ferrand, France; Michelin is a major shareholder in Carbios, and is interested in using various recycled or renewable materials in its tyres. With an almost 5% share, Michelin is the third-largest shareholder in Carbios, after L’Oreal and Family Office, a fund manager. Martin Stephan, Deputy CEO at Carbios, says the demonstration plant will help generate a lot of technical data on how the technology works with different waste streams and different process conditions, so that the company can write a
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per year reference unit, the first industrial plant,” he says. “We will select the site before the end of the year. We start construction around the end of 2022 so that we can start up the plant in 2025.” Intention is that the plant will be adjacent to an existing PET production line. Carbios has Expressions of Intent with at least one PET supplier. Stephan says the reference unit is to de-risk the licensing activity and to be on the market fast enough to meet growing demand for rPET. As for feedstocks, Carbios is initially concentrat- ing on packaging containers and trays, but it is also developing its process to handle textiles. “We have already demonstrated that we can make bottles from textile fibres,” says Stephan. Carbios has a joint development agreement
with leading biological solutions company Novo- zymes to secure the production of Carbios’ proprietary PET-degrading enzymes at both a demonstration level and an industrial scale. The two companies already have a partnership relating to degradation of biopolymer polylactide (or polylactic acid, PLA).
Main image: Ioniqa has a 10,000 tonnes/ yr plant producing BHT monomer from PET bottles
� November/December 2021 | PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD 31
IMAGE: IONIQA
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