West Brabant to become a waste-to-chem hotspot

A consortium of Dutch organisations and businesses in the Dutch province of West Brabant have launched a project that aims to chemically recycle 1 million tons of plastic waste into new building blocks for the chemical industry from 2030 on. By doing so the PyroCHEM project will actively contribute to the sustainability of the chemical industry and the transition to a more circular approach to waste and resource management. There is an urgent and growing demand for circular raw materials and the role of recycling is a crucial one. Recycling not only allows valuable raw materials to be reused but recycling also contributes to reducing CO2 emissions in production chains.

Chemical recycling is a still largely a nascent industry but it is fast becoming one of the most rapidly developing areas in the recycling industry. Its main appeal lies in the possibility to process a far broader range of waste plastics than is currently feasible using mechanical recycling technologies. Chemical recycling can not only handle heavily contaminated and multilayered, multimaterial packaging waste, the output of the process - feedstock - can be used to produce what are virtually virgin-quality chemicals and plastics. In the Netherlands alone, some 629 kilotons of plastic waste are produced annually. This waste is currently incinerated, producing energy; a very low-grade form of waste processing.

The PyroCHEM project is based on pyrolysis. Pyrolysis - basically, thermal decomposition in the absence of oxygen  - can process contaminated plastic - and other (biomass) waste streams into circular or bio-based building blocks such as pyrolysis oil and syngas that the chemical industry can use to make new products.

Pyrolysis technology is still very much under development. Already, however, earlier initiatives such as the pyrolysis test bed at Moerdijk in the Netherlands, successfully demonstrated the technology at pilot scale.  Building on this success, the PyroCHEM project partners will scale up the technology and further develop the value chain. These partners are: the Port of Moerdijk, Waste4ME, Van der Kooy, de Green Chemistry Campus, de Brabantse Ontwikkelingsmaatschappij, Avans Hogeschool and the Centre of Expertise Biobased Economie.

Waste4ME, a company that builds and operates plastics chemical recycling plants will be designing a demonstration plant with a capacity of 35 kilotons. It will be situated in the PyroCHEM Park on the Green Chemistry Campus in Bergen op Zoom. Ultimately, the partners aim to chemically recycle 1 million tons of plastic into valuable raw materials every year from 2030 onwards, which will yield a reduction of  1.7 million tons of CO2-eq each year and save 550 kilotons of petroleum.

The project partners also  propose to create a Waste2Chem open innovation cluster at the site where SMEs will be able to make use of the facilities of the PyroCHEM project partners for the further optimisation of new pyrolysis technologies and work together on roadmaps towards market introduction.

The project involves an investment of nearly €3 million, and is supported by the European fund for regional development and by the province of North Brabant.