Pyrolysis, liquefaction and gasification are promising technologies to recycle plastics that are unsuitable for mechanical recycling. Yet, today more than 90% of the global plastic waste is being incinerated, landfilled or simply discarded into the environment. Today’s chemical recycling goal is turning plastic waste into suitable feed for refinery processes at economy of scale, using existing integrated refinery assets, remove contaminants and ensure feed stability in terms of volume and composition.

The main product of liquefaction and pyrolysis is an oil that contains too high levels of contaminants and needs upgrading before it can be applied in existing refinery processes. This can be done via adsorption, hydrogenation and chemical conversion techniques. Besides, liquefaction and pyrolysis produce significant amounts of CO2 that should be captured and re-converted into base chemicals. Main challenges are to develop the right adsorbents and catalysts including durable catalysts solutions that go beyond the catalyst itself.

Gasification of plastics does not only produce CO and H2, known as syngas, but also CO2 and a suite of contaminants, like Cl and N containing gases. H2, CO and CO2 can be re-converted into valuable chemicals e.g. by Fischer Tropsch, an old process, but with new developments and insights. 

Development of suitable sorbents and catalyst solutions requires a lot of down scaled R&D screening tests. Catalyst vendors, oil majors, chemical recycling companies, plastic manufacturers, institutes and R&D centers are currently working on this. Avantium aims to accelerate that research by offering R&D systems, expertise and services that use multiple parallel reactors that can operate 24/7 under very well defined and reproducible process conditions including automatic sampling enabling both online and offline product analyses. 

Together with leading industry and institutes Avantium developed applications and R&D solutions of which a few examples, including test results shall be given.