Indaver is opening its new chemical recycling plant for plastic waste in the port of Antwerp, the Belgian waste management company announced yesterday. The Indaver Plastics2Chemicals (P2C) plant is capable of processing food packaging waste made from of polystyrene and mixed polyolefins. The post-consumer packaging waste, which includes items such as yoghurt pots and crisps bags, are recycled to produce raw materials that can be used again in the production of food packaging. After two years of construction, the plant is now complete and is entering the testing phase. Indaver expects to reach operational start at the end of the current year.
"By recycling plastics on an industrial scale into raw materials that are as high in quality and purity as their fossil-based counterparts, we avoid the extraction of new raw materials," explained Paul De Bruycker, Indaver CEO. "The reason we chose PS and PO out of more than 100 tested feedstocks is that these materials are currently mechanically recycled into recyclate that is not of sufficient quality to be reused for food packaging, while part of it ends up in the incinerator. Through advanced recycling, P2C instead brings certified recyclate to the market that is equivalent to virgin plastics," he said.
Indaver has been collaborating with the universities of Ghent, Antwerp and Leuven since 2017 on the development of the depolymerisation plant. The new recycling facility will be able to process 26,000 tonnes of plastic waste per year – about three tonnes per hour. Once operational at the end of 2024, the plant will initially recycle pre-treated polystyrene from packaging such as yoghurt pots and meat trays into pure styrene. The output material will then be re-polymerized into PS by Indaver's partners in Flanders....
