Chemical company LyondellBasell and EEW Energy from Waste, a company active in thermal waste and sewage sludge treatment in Europe, have signed an LOI under which they plan to explore a potential long-term strategic partnership to recover and recycle plastics out of waste streams bound for incineration.
The mixed waste streams delivered to the EEW sites collected from households and commercial sites, are considered unrecyclable. However, LyondellBasell and EEW are now intending to investigate whether that is actually the case, at least as far as the plastics in these streams are concerned.
To do so, this would potentially also require the building of pre-sorting facilities at or near EEW’s incineration plants. The recovered plastic would also need to be further sorted and refined in some kind of advanced sorting facility - the kind of advanced sorting infrastructure LyondellBasell needs, and has developed plans to invest in, in order to be able to produce plastic waste-based feedstocks, grow its Circular and Low Carbon Solutions business, and deliver on its value creation ambitions.
"The materials from these sorting facilities would not only support our existing mechanical recycling facilities in the Netherlands and a potential advanced recycling unit in Germany, but also allows us to optimize waste streams and drive additional value,” said Yvonne van der Laan, LyondellBasell executive vice president, Circular and Low Carbon Solutions.
Sorting out the plastics that would otherwise be incinerated and using them instead as feedstock in mechanical and advanced recycling processes moreover eliminates the fossil CO2 emissions associated with combusting the materials.
"With this cooperation, we are creating a convincing solution for plastic waste for which recycling is still ruled out today," says Bernard M. Kemper, chief executive officer EEW Energy from Waste. "EEW will first build a sorting facility and sort out plastics to recover them for the raw material cycle.