Proceeding on the target of commercializing chemical recycling of waste plastic, Neste Corp. (Espoo, Finland) is conducting a feasibility study to examine investing in capacity for processing liquefied waste plastic at its refinery in Porvoo, Finland. The goal is to scale up processing capabilities for liquefied waste plastic by implementing proprietary technologies to pretreat and upgrade liquefied waste plastic and integrating the technologies into the refinery operations. The targeted pretreatment and upgrading capacity of this first step is 400,000 tons per year. This development would be a major step towards Neste’s target to process over 1 million tons of waste plastic per year from 2030 onwards.
To produce drop-in petrochemical feeds from liquefied waste plastic (e.g. pyrolysis oil), intermediate refining is needed to remove detrimental impurities as well as optimize the chemical composition of the material.
“To turn chemical recycling into a viable and industrial-scale feed source for our downstream partners in the polymers and chemicals value chain, we have to bridge the quality gap between unprocessed liquefied waste plastic oil and our customers’ raw material requirements,” explains Mercedes Alonso, Executive Vice President, Renewable Polymers and Chemicals at Neste. “We are a forerunner in refining liquefied waste plastic into drop-in petrochemical feeds. By scaling up our processing capabilities, we enhance our ability to process hard-to-recycle waste plastics and help enable our value chain partners to deliver substantial volumes of high-quality materials from recycled feedstock.”