Austria's OMV, Italy's Versalis announce chemical recycling plans for plastics

Austrian refiner OMV has announced the final investment decision for a plant to sort mixed plastics and provide feedstock for chemical recycling, while Italian petrochemical company Versalis has begun construction of a demo plant to chemically recycle plastic waste, the companies said Oct. 31.

The OMV sorting plant will have capacity of up to 260,000 mt/year in Walldürn, Germany, providing raw materials for virgin polyolefins, which go into a range of plastics, and production is expected to take place in 2026, the company said in a statement.

Chemical recycling of plastics refers to the process of recycling polymers back to their chemical building blocks.

In 2023 to date, the wider recycling market in Europe has suffered from subdued demand and tough price competition in comparison with virgin polymer grades, while the operating cost of recycling has remained high, primarily due to energy prices.

The OMV sorting facility will be the first of its kind to produce feedstock for the company's chemical recycling on a large industrial scale. The process converts plastic waste that cannot be mechanically recycled into pyrolysis oil. The input for the sorting plant essentially involves mixed plastics that have not been recyclable until now, OMV said.

One of the most popular kinds of chemical recycling technologies is the pyrolysis process. A key challenge faced by pyrolysis plants has been obtaining suitable plastic bale feedstocks, according to delegates attending the Chemical Recycling webinar hosted by the British Plastics Federation Oct. 19.

The project of Versalis, the petrochemical arm of Italian energy company Eni, results from collaboration started in 2020 with National Consortium for the Collection, Recycling and Recovery of Plastic Packaging, or Corepla, to enhance the value of post-consumer plastics from national recycling collection.

The Versalis plant will be able to handle 6,000 mt of secondary raw material and is scheduled to be up and running by the end of 2024. The plant, in Mantua, Italy is to develop technology for the chemical recycling of mixed plastic waste, Versalis said.

Some European chemical recyclers prefer mixed polyolefin-based feedstock bales as the ideal input for the pyrolysis process. Prior to inputting the mixed plastic bales into the pyrolysis process, some chemical recyclers may opt to further sort the bales themselves in order to limit undesirable substances, such as polyvinyl chloride, which is a contaminant for polyolefinic-oriented pyrolysis due to its chlorine content, according to chemical recyclers.

Platts assessed mechanically recycled high density polyethylene natural pellets at Eur1,700/mt ($1,803/mt) on an FD Northwest Europe basis and recycled low density polyethylene translucent pellets at Eur930/mt on a DDP Northwest Europe basis Oct. 30, respectively.