Neste to Invest further in Facilities for Liquefied Plastic Waste
Finnish company Neste intends to upgrade its facilities for liquefied plastic waste at its Porvoo refinery in Finland.
With the investment of 111 million Euro, the producer of renewable fuels, who is also developing chemical recycling to combat the plastic waste challenge, announced to build the capacity to upgrade 150,000 tons of liquefied waste plastic per year. “Upgrading is one of the three processing steps turning liquefied waste plastic into high-quality feedstock for new plastics: pretreatment, upgrading and refining,” Neste informed in June this year. The investment would be part of the company’s broader project (PULSE = Pretreatment and Upgrading of Liquefied waste plastic to Scale up Circular Economy), which has received an EU Innovation Fund grant of 135 million Euro “if fully implemented and is targeting a total capacity of 400,000 tons per year”.
Pretreatment and upgrading of liquefied waste plastic play an important role in Neste’s approach to chemical recycling. They would allow the company to increase flexibility for processing lower-quality plastic waste and scale up processing the liquefied waste plastic into high-quality petrochemical feedstock in its existing refinery in Porvoo. “We have developed our capability to process circular raw material at the Porvoo refinery over the recent years and are now set to build a respective facility,” Markku Korvenranta, Executive Vice President of Neste’s Oil Products, was quoted. “The new facility processing 150,000 tons of liquefied waste plastic, is planned to be finalized in the first half of 2025.”
According to the company, the project will see Neste building new assets as well as leveraging existing assets through retrofitting, to scale up chemical recycling fast and efficiently. The upgraded liquefied waste plastic would then be processed in the conventional refinery, which will replace a portion of the fossil resources processed at the Porvoo refinery.
(Published in GLOBAL RECYCLING Magazine 3/2023, Page 15, Photo: Neste)
