An Italian chemical recycling project being jointly developed by petrochemicals company Saipem and materials recovery specialist Garbo has been selected to receive around €15.5m in funding under the EU Innovation Fund. The central component of the "Renova Chempet" project is a recycling plant scheduled to come onstream in early 2029 with a capacity of around 45,000 tonnes of recycled PET per year. It will be built at Garbo's site in Cerano, in the north-western Italian province of Novara.
The project is to be the first industrial-scale deployment of the "Chempet" technology, a proprietary depolymerisation process developed by Garbo and owned jointly with Saipem. Based on glycolysis, Chempet converts PET into BHET (bis-hydroxy ethylene terephthalate), which can then be purified and used again to produce new PET. Garbo has previously said the process can handle difficult-to-recycle PET fractions, including coloured and opaque bottles, multilayer trays, thermoforming offcuts, PET laminated with aluminium or polyethylene, black PET, PET/PP strapping, nonwovens and polyester blends.
Saipem is acting as lead partner for engineering, procurement and construction of the facility. The companies first formalised their cooperation in 2023, when they announced plans for a two-line Chempet plant in Cerano and a wider partnership to industrialise and license the technology globally.
The Chempet project was one of 61 selected in the EU Innovation Fund's 2024 call for net-zero technologies medium-scale projects. The results of the call for projects were announced last month, with a total of €200m in funding designated for "medium-scale" projects with Capex between €2.5m and €20m.
Saipem currently expects that a grant agreement with the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA) will be signed by March 2026, allowing disbursement of the funding to begin. "The recognition granted by the EU Innovation Fund confirms the strength of the collaboration between Saipem and Garbo and the robustness of the Chempet technology, which is set to contribute to reducing emissions and strengthening the green chemistry value chain in Italy and across Europe," said Saipem.
