Chemical Recycling
What is chemical recycling?
Chemical recycling is the reprocessing of waste streams into their base molecular parts so they can be used as chemical feedstock or to produce new polymers. Chemicals recycling differs to mechanical recycling which involves physical processes such as shredding, melting etc.
By turning plastic waste back into base chemicals and chemical feedstocks, chemical recycling processes have the potential to divert plastic waste from landfill or incineration.
How can etasca help?
The etasca team has extensive commercial and technical experience reviewing all major chemicals recycling routes, e.g., pyrolysis, gasification and depolymerisation.
Interested? contactus@etasca.com
million Euros
chemical recycling in
Europe by 2030(1)
million tons
of recycled plastics to
be produced in Europe
by 2030 vs. 0.9Mt in 2025(1)
Commercial considerations:
- The production of chemically recycled plastics is estimated to increase to 0.9 Mt in 2025 and 2.8 Mt in 2030 a CAGR of 25%
- There is €8bn planned investment in chemical recycling in Europe by 2030(1).
The major users of packaging, e.g., FMCGs such as Unilever are driving demand for recycled plastics – this will accelerate as recycled content requirements increase.
- This is particularly true in the EU where Directives have been introduced to target 50% of packaging waste to be recycled by 2025 and 55% by 2030.
Demand for circular chemicals is currently outpacing the supply of sorted waste – therefore the viability of projects will depend on the security of supply of the right composition of waste.
- Understanding the importance of this has been demonstrated by Plastic Energy’s recent acquisition of a major collector/sorter of waste.
The availability and cost of waste feedstock will be affected by the move in 2028 to apply the Emissions Trading Scheme (“ETS”) to Energy Recovery Facilities (“ERF”) in both the EU and UK.
- This carbon tax will impact the economics of ERF’s operations – potentially making chemicals recycling operations a more economic route to waste management. ERFs likely to be more costly as a disposal route for municipal waste etc. as they attempt to recoup costs.
Technical considerations:
Gasification and pyrolysis are the main technologies deployed for chemicals recycling.
- Pyrolysis benefits from the output’s nearly fungible outputs for chemicals producers relative to gasification.
- Gasification plants can take a rougher cut of waste allowing a broader pool of available feedstock. This generally makes gasification plants much larger than pyrolysis plants.
Waste / plastic feedstock supply is critical to the viability of chemicals recycling.
- The composition of waste material will dictate which chemicals recycling technologies are viable – as well as the economics of the project.
Chemicals recycling plants remain subscale versus conventional chemicals processing plants.
- Chemicals recycling plant capacities are typically limited to 50 tons/day – although technologies are quickly scaling capacity, the larger commercialised pyrolysis plants still typically have capacity below 80kta (this compares to world-scale steam crackers now having 1.5MTA + of capacity) and polyolefin plants typically having 700 KTA+ of capacity.
1. Source: Plastics Europe