Renewable chemistry company Avantium N.V. in the Netherland has signed a conditional offtake agreement with Resilux, an international rigid plastic packaging supplier, for the supply of PEF resin from the FDCA flagship plant Avantium is planning to build.
It is the fifth such agreement and marks a key commercial milestone for the plan: the five conditional offtake agreements represent a total offtake volume of over 50% of the proposed FDCA production capacity - 5kT/pa - from the flagship plant.
Previously, contracts were signed with specialty chemical company Toyobo (Japan), specialty polyester film producer Terphane (US), the beverage bottling company Refresco (Netherlands), and an undisclosed major global food & beverage brand owner.The offtake commitments are subject to a positive FID, financial closing, other customary approvals, and party-specific conditions.
The packaging applications produced by Resilux (Belgium) vary from monolayer bottles, multilayer bottles and polyester film products for food & beverage packaging to electronics. The company views PEF as a means to continue to prove the power of PET as a safe, sustainable and recyclable packaging material, said Dirk De Cuyper, CEO of Resilux Group.
”In combination with our constant focus on the expansion and development of high quality PET recycling solutions, PEF will allow us to offer sustainable solutions in special, high end applications,” he noted.
In multilayer bottles, PEF can be used as a barrier material in multilayer PET bottles, leading to improved sustainability and recyclability compared to multilayer bottles with other barrier materials such as nylon. This opens the door for alternative “Design for Recycling” solutions:
less than 2% of polyamide in a PET waste stream can cause so much haze that the r-PET is rendered unusable. PEF is chemically so similar to PET that it blends well during the recycling process, forming a co-polymer and hardly affecting the resulting r-PET. A PET/PEF mixture will stay almost completely transparent with up to 5 % PEF. This makes PEF highly suitable for combinations with PET without affecting its recyclability.
Resilux’s commitment represents another step in the direction of a positive Final Investment Decision (FID) for the construction of the new FDCA plant. Avantium would plan to open in the new plant in 2023.