Austin, Texas -- Eastman Chemical Co. expects to hit full production at the company's new chemical recycling plant in Tennessee during the second half of this year, taking lessons from those operations and applying them to two additional facilities planned for the future.
The Kingsport, Tenn.-based company indicated in early February that production had started at the firm's first recycling plant using a process called methanolysis that breaks down PET into chemical building blocks that can make new virgin-like PET.
Chris Layton, director of sustainability for specialty plastics at Eastman, provided additional details recently at The Packaging Conference in Austin.
Eastman has spent the last year or so building up an inventory of feedstock processed from mixed plastic waste in preparation for the plant to begin operations. Now that the facility is online and working to increase production over time, the company will activate supply agreements to bring much more material to Kingsport.
"We have been doing mixed waste processing since the first quarter of last year. More than 40 million pounds of methanolysis-ready feed that's set to go," Layton said at the conference. "We have been buying material for the better part of the last 12 to 18 months."
At full throttle, the Kingsport facility will produce 110,000 metric tons per year.
Eastman, Layton said, is concentrating on the Kingsport project for now and expects a 2027 time frame for the opening of the other two locations — another in the United States and one in Europe. When announcing the France project in 2022, Eastman originally expected a 2025 opening date.
"We are holding those to make sure we have Kingsport started up. As you can imagine, we only have so many resources, and all attention, all focus is getting the Kingsport facility up and running," he said.
Eastman has used another type of chemical recycling in Kingsport since 2019 called glycolysis to help it get into the market to understand the dynamics of the chemical recycling business. Layton said it is "to be determined" whether the glycolysis business will continue operating once the methanolysis facility is fully operational.
Methanolysis produces both dimethyl terephthalate and ethylene glycol, which then can be used to create new PET.
Chemical recycling is a broad-based description for a variety of processes that break down mixed plastics into their chemical building blocks that then can be reconstituted into new plastics or fuels. Other names for the approach include advanced recycling or molecular recycling. All of these approaches differ from traditional mechanical recycling that does not alter the chemical makeup of recycled plastics, but instead cleans and reprocess the material.
Methanolysis and glycolysis earn their names honestly as Methanolysis uses methanol and glycolysis uses glycol in their respective processes to break down plastic. Pyrolysis is yet another approach, maybe the most talked about in the chemical recycling field, that uses heat and pressure in the absence of oxygen to break down plastics to the molecular level.
Layton told the conference crowd that Eastman's methanolysis approach will produce 20 to 50 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than the creation of virgin plastics, and the savings will depend on how far recycled plastics are transported to Kingsport as well as the level of preprocessing the company has do perform.
"By starting with waste plastics, we eliminate a bunch of steps that would normally consumer energy and create greenhouse gas emissions with the production of virgin fossil fuel-based polymers," Layton said.
Eastman decided to move forward with the methanolysis plant after using the technology on a smaller scale in Rochester, N.Y., when the company was part of Eastman Kodak Co., the famed photography firm.
Kodak used methanolysis in Rochester to recycle X-ray film, removing the valuable silver coating before recyclaiming the remaining PET film. Economics eventually caused Kodak to discontinue methanolysis in Rochester, but the technology was available to Eastman Chemical, which spun off from Kodak in 1994.
"We operated a methanolysis unit for almost 40 years as part of Kodak in Rochester, N.Y. We've taken that learning and incorporated that into the Kingsport plant," Layton said.
Now the lessons from Kingsport will inform the company as Eastman plans the other two methanolysis facilities, one in France and a second one in the United States, he said. "With each one we are evolving."