Dow Inc said on Thursday that it is partnering with the Netherlands-based Fuenix Ecogy Group to turn recycled plastic waste into oil.
Dow will use the feedstock, pyrolysis oil, to produce new polymers at its production facilities at Terneuzen in the Netherlands, the U.S. chemicals giant said.
"This agreement marks an important step forward to increase feedstock recycling - the process of breaking down mixed waste plastics into their original form to manufacture new virgin polymers," Dow said.
Sirt Mellema, chief executive at Fuenix, said:
"This partnership offers us the opportunity to scale up our technology. Our ambition is to ensure the value of plastic waste is fully used to create new, circular plastic while significantly reducing the global use of virgin raw materials and CO2 emissions."
The new polymers produced from the pyrolysis oil will be identical to those made from traditional feedstocks such as hydrocarbons, and being identical, they can be used in the same applications, the U.S. firm said.
"The plastics that we make from the pyrolysis oil and the crude oil are the same," Carsten Larsen, Dow's director of recycling in Asia and Europe, told Bloomberg in an interview published today.
The deal is also a step for Dow to meet its pledge to have at least 100,000 tons of recycled plastics in its product offerings sold in the European Union (EU) by 2025, the company said.
Amid growing global concern about the overuse of plastic, Austria's oil and gas group OMV and Austrian Airlines partnered earlier this year to turn the plastic cups the airline's passengers have used into synthetic crude that could be later processed into fuels or other plastic products.
According to Closed Loop Partners, an investment firm focused on building the circular economy, global demand for plastics is strong and growing, while the supply of recycled plastics available to meet demand is stuck at just 6 percent.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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