Exxon Mobil’s first commercial customer for the mass-balanced circular polymer it produces at its advanced recycling facility at its Baytown, Texas site is Berry Global, the company has announced.
Berry will use the these resins to manufacture containers for food-grade packaging.
ExxonMobil opened the facility in Baytown last year. Since then, almost 1900 tonnes of plastic waste have been processed, converting this via a process dubbed Exxtend into feedstock suitable for the production of new virgin-quality polymers.
“We have ambitious sustainable packaging goals that include achieving 30 percent circular content across our fast-moving consumer goods packaging by 2030,” said Tarun Manroa, chief strategy officer of Berry Global.
To meet demand in the market, ExxonMobil is currently expanding the facility, aiming to achieve a waste recycling capacity of 30,000 tonnes per year later this year.
Ultimately, the company’s annual advanced recycling capacity to 500,000 tonnes by year-end 2026 across multiple sites globally. To that end, the company is collaborating in Europe with Plastic Energy on an advanced recycling plant in Notre Dame de Gravenchon, France, which is expected to process 25,000 tonnes of plastic waste per year when it starts up in 2023, with the potential for further expansion to 33,000 tonnes of annual capacity. The company is also assessing sites in the Netherlands, the U.S. Gulf Coast, Canada, and Singapore.
The company has already obtained certifications through the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification Plus (ISCC PLUS) process for several of its facilities, including Baytown and Notre Dame de Gravenchon. ISCC PLUS is widely recognised by industry as an effective system to certify the circularity of products based on advanced recycling using mass balance attribution of plastic waste.
To secure a steady source of plastic waste for its advanced recycling operations, ExxonMobil invested in December 2020 $8 million to form a joint venture with Agilyx Corporation, giving the company a 25% stake in Agilyx’s feedstock management initiative, Cyclyx International LLC.The deal gives ExxonMobil priority access to recovered plastics for its own recycling efforts.