MOSCOW (MRC) -- Honeywell has announced the commercialization of a revolutionary process that expands the types of plastics that can be recycled and can produce feedstock used to make recycled plastics with a lower carbon footprint, according to Hydrocarbonprocessing.
The new technology can reduce the need for fossil fuels in the creation of virgin plastics while enabling hundreds of cycles of recycling, with the goal of enabling a circular economy for plastics.
Honeywell's UpCycle Process Technology utilizes industry-leading molecular conversion, pyrolysis, and contaminants management technology to convert waste plastic back to Honeywell Recycled Polymer Feedstock, which is then used to create new plastics.
The UpCycle Process technology expands the types of plastics that can be recycled to include waste plastic that would otherwise go unrecycled, including colored, flexible, multilayered packaging and polystyrene (PS). When used in conjunction with other chemical and mechanical recycling processes - along with improvements to collection and sorting Honeywell's UpCycle Process Technology has the potential to increase the amount of global plastic waste that can be recycled to 90%.
Recycled plastics produced via UpCycle Process Technology can result in a 57% reduction of CO2-equivalent (CO2e) emissions compared with the production of the same amount of virgin plastic from fossil feeds.2 The process also reduces CO2e emissions by 77% compared with conventional modes of handling waste plastic, such as incineration and landfilling2.
"Plastics play an important role in our society, including expanding the shelf life of food and making vehicles lighter, which reduces their emissions. Unfortunately, only a fraction of plastics today can be successfully recycled," said Vimal Kapur, president and chief executive officer of Honeywell Performance Materials and Technologies. "Honeywell's UpCycle process helps fix this problem. By broadening the types of plastic that can be recycled, UpCycle will revolutionize the plastics economy and play a critical role in improving the sustainability of many of the products we use on a daily basis."
Sacyr, a Spain-based global engineering and services company with operations in more than 20 countries worldwide, will be the first to deploy Honeywell's proprietary UpCycle Process Technology. Honeywell and Sacyr will form a joint venture where the two companies will co-own and operate a facility in Andalucia, in Southern Spain, with a capacity to transform 30,000 metric t per yr of mixed waste plastics into Honeywell Recycled Polymer Feedstock. Production is expected to begin in 2023.
Honeywell's UpCycle Process Technology was created within Honeywell's Sustainable Technology Solutions (STS) group, which is part of Honeywell UOP. This latest technology builds upon Honeywell's focus to deliver high impact, environmentally sustainable solutions for customers and society.
Honeywell recently committed to achieve carbon neutrality in its operations and facilities by 2035.
As MRC reported earlier, in March 2021, Honeywell announced that Hengli Petrochemical Co. Ltd. successfully used Callidus burner technology from Honeywell UOP to minimize nitrogen oxide (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO) emissions in China, and reduce the impact of these emissions while ensuring safe and stable operations.
Besides, in November, 2020, Honeywell announced Zhenhua Petrochemical Co. Ltd will use Honeywell UOP’s C3 Oleflex technology for propane dehydrogenation to process 1 million metric tons per year of polymer-grade propylene for a proposed plant in Dongying City, Shandong Province, China.
Propylene is the main feedstock for production of polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, PP shipments to the Russian market were 989,570 tonnes in the first eight months of 2021, up by 30% year on year. Deliveries of homopolymer PP and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased, whereas shipments of injection moulding PP random copolymers decreased significantly.
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