Chemical recycling
The world has recycled less than 10% of plastics between 1950 and 2015. The rest got incinerated or landfilled, ending up at times in our environment where it's there to stay for centuries. We hate reading these numbers. All the more if you consider that the technology to recycle plastic is becoming widely available.
At Renewi, we work every day to find new ways to turn discarded plastic into secondary raw materials. One of the most common ways to recycle plastic is via mechanical recycling. Whilst this is the go-to solution for many plastic recyclers, it presents some challenges. Namely, it lowers the plastic's quality, maintains the original colour, and can’t be used for food packaging if the waste's source is unknown.
As Renewi's purpose is to protect the world by giving new life to used materials, we're committed to strengthening our role in plastic's value chain. Apart from increasing our recycling volumes and improving the quality of our mechanical recycling, we also plan to implement new recycling processes like pyrolysis, gasification or depolymerisation – all processes part of chemical recycling.
Our investments in chemical recycling aim to lower the amount of plastic incinerated every year because it's highly contaminated or economically inviable for mechanical recycling. For these waste streams, chemical recycling is a more circular answer. It can process lower-quality plastic waste whilst maintaining a recycled plastic's quality similar to virgin materials.
Renewi's role in this innovation is to collect, sort and separate plastic waste to create a consistent input waste stream for the chemical processing plants. The goal is to reach a production volume of recycled plastic between 20 and 50 kt/a by 2025.
Share your innovative ideaAre you or your organisation interested in circularity and have an innovative solution? Do you wish to implement it at a commercial scale? At Renewi, we’d love to hear from you! Any solution is welcome, and we would love to start with those with the highest and direct impact. Can we help to scale your solution? |
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