Page 175 - CW E-Magazine (12-3-2024)

Special Report

panies) enterprise, which is represented International Business Machines Cor- uids including oils, diesel, naphtha,
by Shuye Environmental Technology poration (IBM) (Armonk, NY, USA), and monomers as well as syngas, char,
(Shantou, China). DuPont Teijin Films (Tokyo, Japan), to waxes. Depending on the obtained
and Dow (Midland, MI, USA). products these can be utilised as renew-
Enzymolysis able feedstocks for the production of
An alternative path represents Pyrolysis new polymers.
enzymolysis, a technology based on bio- With pyrolysis, a thermochemical
chemical processes utilising different recycling process is available that With 40,000-tpa, the second-largest
kinds of biocatalysts to depolymerise a converts or depolymerises mixed capacity found in the report is realised
polymer into its building units. Being in plastic wastes (mainly polyolefins) and with pyrolysis. The majority of the 80
an early development phase, this tech- biomass into liquids, solids, and gases identified technology providers are
nology is available only at lab-scale. in presence of heat and absence of located in Europe (42 providers) followed
Currently, only one enzymolysis tech- oxygen. Obtained products range from by North America (21 providers), Rest
nology provider was identified, which for instance different fractions of liq- of the world (11 providers), China (four
is a small enterprise located in Europe.

Solvolysis
The solvent-based solvolysis
describes a chemical process based on
depolymerisation, which can be realised
with different solvents. This process
breaks down polymers (mainly PET)
into their building units (e.g. mono-
mers, dimers, oligomers). After break-
down, the building units need to be
cleaned from the other plastic compo-
nents (e.g. additives, pigments, fillers,
non-targeted polymers). After cleaning,
the building units are polymerised to
synthesise new polymers.

With 24 companies, fewer solvo- Fig. 2: Installed and running advanced recycling plants in EU27+3.
lysis technology providers are on the
market compared to pyrolysis, also
offering smaller capacities typically
between 550-8,7500 tpa. Of the iden-
tified solvolysis technology providers
a majority are located in Europe (14
providers) followed by North America
(seven providers), Japan (two provi-
ders, and China (one provider). With
nine companies the majority of pro-
viders are mainly small enterprises
followed by large- (seven companies),
medium- (five companies), and micro/
start-up (two companies) enterprises.
Among the large enterprises, there are
Aquafil (Arco, Trentino, Italy, East-
man Chemical Company (Kingsport,
TN, USA), IFP Energies Nouvelles
(IFPEN) (Rueil-Malmaison, France), Fig. 3: Installed input capacities for different advanced recycling technologies in EU27+3.

Chemical Weekly March 12, 2024 175

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