Around the globe, interest in advanced recycling continued to expand over the past year, despite the doubts and concerns voiced in various quarters about the environmental credentials of the various technologies. Nor has the pandemic dampened the enthusiasm about its potential as a solution for recycling the vast mountains of hitherto unrecyclable waste.
According to Susan Hansen, Global Strategist F&A Supply Chains, at Rabobank, who was responsible for the Rabobank report that appeared last year in September, the past months alone saw a large number of plans being announced for the construction of various different types of facilities, ’including more than 70 additional plants’.
“And oil companies are also highly active at the moment,” she said, pointing to Shell’s partnership with, and acquisition of a 21.5% equity share in, technology provider BlueAlp.
Recent announcements have included the development of new traceability solutions, aimed at creating transparency regarding the origins of a material; partnerships, acquisitions, equity stakes, and a host of new players entering the industry. Advanced recycling, said Hansen, is hot.
Critics
Advanced recycling, also referred to as chemical recycling or feedstock recycling, is a blanket term for a variety of different technologies, including depolymerisation, pyrolysis, gasification and even enzymatic recycling. They are all technologies that are able to process waste plastics that mechanical recycling cannot handle and may therefore be considered complementary to mechanical recycling.
According to a study published by AMI International in September 2020, waste plastics processed through advanced recycling technologies could amount to between 5 and 15 million tons of additional plastic waste being recycled per year by 2030. And according to one 2021 study, if all the announced projects are actually built, installed advanced recycling capacity would be 400% more by 2025 than is available today.
However, these technologies also have their detractors. An earlier Rabobank report published in the spring forecast that by 2025, there could be as many as 140 advanced recycling plants operating worldwide with a total capacity of 3m to 4m metric tons. That report provoked an outcry from the opponents of this form of recycling.
Arguments, such as the technology is still unproven and too costly, or that it has a worse-than-advertised environmental performance are commonly heard. Sceptics also frequently point to the lack of traceability in the system, and to the fact that planned investments are forever being delayed, said Hansen. Some critics even claim that the technology is a greenwashing tool with the sole purpose of serving as an expensive circumvention for waste-to-energy treatment.
“Partly in response to the traceability concerns, players are increasing their focus on making advanced recycling supply chains more transparent,” Hansen said.
Asia gets in on the game
Criticism notwithstanding, the interest and activity in advanced recycling have grown explosively. Even companies who have come under scrutiny, such as Loop Industries and PureCycle have had no trouble attracting new investors and partnerships and have announced ambitious expansion plans.
Next to the voices of criticism, there are also many practical, financial, and economic hurdles to overcome if the advanced recycling industry is to become a large-scale, commercially viable industry.
It is nonetheless a highly attractive investment opportunity for key industry players and investors, said Hansen. “The outlook is optimistic in terms of investor interest, yet companies will need to increasingly balance a growing level of criticism and prepare to build more transparent supply chains. This is needed to continue to attract financing to scale up the technology and roll-out facilities,” Hansen underlined.
Throughout 2021, Asian players, in particular from South Korea and Japan, have become aware of the technology’s potential and have grown exceptionally active in the advanced recycling space. Companies like Mitsui (Japan), SK Geo Centric, and Kumho Petrochemical (both South Korea) are forming partnerships with technology companies to jointly explore opportunities for setting up advanced recycling plants, primarily in their home region.
2021 developments
In May, Neste, Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. and Toyota Tsusho Corp. established a partnership to realise Japan’s first industrial-scale production of renewable polymers from 100% bio-based hydrocarbons. The collaboration will see Neste produce its Neste RE feedstock entirely from renewable raw materials - bio-based waste and residue oils - without any fossil oil. The feedstock is a drop-in solution that can be used on its own or in a blend to create products of identical quality to those made out of conventional raw materials based on virgin fossil oil.
PureCycle Technologies Inc. signed a Memorandum of Understanding in September with Tokyo-based Mitsui & Coin September for the development of a facility for the production of what it calls ultra-pure recycled polypropylene (UPRP) in Japan. The technology used by PureCycle is a physical purification process that uses a non-toxic solvent to extract colour, odour and contaminants from recovered waste polypropylene, yielding recycled polypropylene of exceptional purity and consistent quality. The process, developed by Procter & Gamble, aims to convert waste polypropylene (PP) from a wide range of sources into virgin-like UPRP. The news about the MOU with Mitsui comes hard on the heels of a similar announcement last month, in which the company said it had signed an MOU with SK Chemicals, to explore the feasibility of building a PP recycling plant in South Korea.
Towards the end of October, Totalenergies Corbion, formerlyTotal Corbion PL, announced the launch of the world’s first commercially available chemically recycled PLA. The company is already receiving and depolymerising reprocessed PLA waste, which is then purified and polymerised back into commercially available Luminy rPLA. Currently, Looplife in Belgium and Sansu in Korea are among the first active partners to support the collection, sorting and cleaning of post-industrial and post-consumer PLA waste. The resulting PLA feedstock is then used by Totalenergies Corbion to make new Luminy PLA polymers via the chemical recycling process.
Materials supplier Ravago SA and renewable energy firm Neste announced plans in October to build a chemical recycling plant at North Sea Port in Vlissingen, the Netherlands. The facility will be built based on technology developed by Akron, Ohio-based Alterra Energy. Both Ravago and Neste are minority investors in Alterra. The plant will have an annual processing capacity of about 55,000 tons of mixed plastic waste. The plant is intended as a ‘starting-point’: in the longer terms, the partners aim to increase capacity and to grow the joint venture into a chemical recycling global leader.
In Canada, too, interest in chemical recycling is picking up. Talks are ongoing between Aduro Clean Technologies, a company that has developed and patented water-based technologies to chemically recycle plastics and transform heavy crude and renewable oils into new resources and fuels, and Canadian recycler Switch Energy. The companies are exploring the development of a framework for collaboration with one another. The first project would be the joint design, building, installation, and operation of a pilot plant to process waste plastics such as polyethylene and polypropylene. Aduro’s HTC technology operates at low temperatures, has no issue dealing with high concentration levels of moisture, and is versatile enough to process other types of plastics and contaminates. The technology was previously also subject to a comprehensive and detailed review by Brightlands Chemelot Campus, an international shared innovation community located in Limburg, the Netherlands. That review concluded that HCT offers distinct advantages over traditional pyrolysis for bringing PE into the circular economy through chemical recycling to obtain valuable, high-purity products, such as value-added chemicals or feedstock for the production of new, virgin PE.
Among the newcomers in 2021 was Honeywell, who announced at the beginning of November, the launch of an ‘upcycling’ technology the company said was suitable for up to 90% of all waste plastics. According to Honeywell, its new UpCycle Process Technology makes use of sophisticated molecular conversion, pyrolysis, and contaminants management technology allowing waste plastic to be converted back into what the company calls Honeywell Recycled Polymer Feedstock. This feedstock can then be used to create new plastics. A life cycle analysis performed by Honeywell in October 2021 demonstrated a 57% reduction of CO2-equivalent (CO2e) emissions for recycled plastics produced via the new technology compared to conventionally produced virgin plastic from fossil feeds. The process also was shown to reduce CO2e emissions by 77% compared with, for example, incineration and landfilling. These CO2e reductions are some of the largest improvements among all pyrolysis technology offerings. The study that is still pending critical review.
Sacyr, a Spain-based engineering and services company, will be the first to use the technology. Honeywell and Sacyr will form a joint venture where the two companies will co-own and operate an initial facility in Andalucía, in southern Spain, with a capacity to process 30,000 metric tons per year of mixed waste plastics.
Also in November, UK-headquartered chemical recycling company Plastic Energy completed a €145 million round of financing from three separate investors. The company, which is headquartered in the UK, currently operates two plastic-to-plastic chemical recycling plants in Spain. Construction on additional plants in France and the Netherlands is underway. Plastic Energy plans to use the proceeds to accelerate its growth, to expand its technology and its global portfolio of recycling plants. Two weeks previously, the company had announced a collaboration with recycling technology provider Freepoint Eco-Systems and oil and gas company TotalEnergies for the construction of an advanced recycling plant in Texas.