Blog
14th September 2020
LyondellBasell Industries N.V. is a Dutch multinational chemical company with American and European roots, established in the Netherlands, with U.S. operations headquarters in Houston, Texas, and offices in London, UK. The company is the largest licensor of polyethylene and polypropylene technologies. It is an expert in producing other polymeric substances such as ethylene, propylene, polyolefins, and oxyfuels. LyondellBasell produces materials and products that are vital for modern challenges. Some of the key innovative solutions include enhancing food safety while using lightweight and flexible packaging, ensuring the purity of water supplies through stronger and more versatile pipes, enhancing the safety, comfort, and fuel efficiency of many of the vehicles on the road, and making sure of the safe and effective functionality in electronics and appliances. Being very active and successful in coming up with such sustainable and highly creative innovative technologies, it has come up with a new molecular recycling facility also acronymed MoReTec (Molecular Recycling Technology), at its Ferrara, Italy, site, aiming at plastic recycling.
Plastics are one of the human-made materials that pose a huge threat to the environment as they take hundreds of years to decompose completely. Recycling the plastic materials is also highly challenging as the segregation of various types of plastics, removal of colors, pigments, and dyes, handling of the resulting toxic by-products should be properly taken care of. LyondellBasell’s new pilot facility is focusing on returning post-consumer plastic waste to its molecular form for use as a feedstock for new plastic materials. It is proposed that these recycled plastics could find a place in the production of food packaging and health care products, that require strict regulatory requirements to be met.
"Ending plastic waste in the environment and advancing the circular economy are key sustainability focus areas for our company," said Jim Seward, LyondellBasell Senior Vice President of Research & Development (R&D), Technology and Sustainability. "With our advanced plastics recycling technology, we return larger volumes of plastic waste back into the value chain and produce new materials for high-quality applications, retaining their value for as long as possible."
LyondellBasell has been known to conduct base research in the area of advanced plastics recycling. In July 2018, the company collaborated with Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. It succeeded in advancing molecular recycling technology, MoReTec, on a laboratory scale and announced the plan of constructing a pilot plant at Ferrara, Italy. On the 8th of September, 2020, the plant's operation has successfully been started. It is to be noted that the work of MoReTec started at the Houston Technology Center (HTC) in the US when some catalyst types potentially suitable for MoReTec were identified. The research was, primarily, done in Germany though the plant has been set up in Italy. It involved its Research and Development center in Frankfurt and reactor in KIT, Germany in developing this technology. HTC is continuing to work on catalysts, performing testing on plastic waste to pyrolysis oil that will serve as feedstock, developing new analytical techniques for plastic waste and pyrolysis oil characterization, and researching post-treatment techniques on the pyrolysis oil, all for the betterment of this technology’s quality.
This technology of plastic-plastics conversion complements the company’s other circular solutions. The company has bought 50% of Quality Circular Polymers (QCP), a joint venture with SUEZ, in 2018, to mechanically recycle plastics from packaging wastes and obtain them in a pellet form that can find its use in variable applications. It has also been successful in producing plastics, in 2019, from renewable raw materials of the likes of cooking and vegetable oil wastes. The manufactured plastics are A grade, meeting all regulatory requirements for purity and offer the same high-quality properties as those of virgin plastics. Together, these technologies can help in reducing plastic waste production and in the advancement of the circular economy, certainly.
LyondellBasell has even been added to Fortune magazine's list of the "World's Most Admired Companies" for the third consecutive year, in 2020. Coming up with the most innovative technologies in plastic synthesis and recycling, it has successfully started its plant in Ferrara that is capable of processing between 5 and 10 kilograms of household plastic waste per hour. The company is building on that research and is testing the most promising catalysts to be used in the process. The goal of the company is to establish an industrial scale, revenue-producing plant, eventually, while aiming to understand the interaction of various waste types in the molecular recycling process and testing the various catalysts, confirming the process temperature and time needed to decompose the plastic waste into molecules, within the next two years.
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Image Source: LyondellBasell Industries