Suez and its partners have abandoned their plans to build a large-scale chemical recycling facility for PET in Saint-Avold, France. The project had been announced in February 2023 by environmental services group Suez along with technology supplier Loop Industries and South Korean firm SK Geo Centric (SKGC). The French regional broadcaster France 3 Grand Est reported in early November that Suez had not exercised its option to purchase the site earmarked for the plant.
Despite securing public funding, the project has reportedly been put on ice. Construction of the facility was originally scheduled to start in the first quarter of 2025.
Suez and Loop Industries have not responded to EUWID’s request for a comment. Suez told France Info that the three companies involved had mutually agreed not to pursue the project. It added, however, that Suez still believes in the next-generation "molecular processing” technology developed by Loop Industries, which was to be used at the facility, and plans to continue its R&D work in this area.
When the plans were announced in 2023, it was estimated that a total of €450m would be invested in the project in the Lorraine region on the border to Germany, creating 200 jobs. Suez now told the German newspaper Saarbrücker Zeitung the decision to axe these plans came in response to "inflationary cost growth” and the macroeconomic situation. In its report, France 3 cited an anonymous industry insider who noted that the cost to produce this recycled PET would be more than €2,000 per tonne whereas primary PET is currently selling for around €900 per tonne.
Pre-treatment and recycling plant
The "Parkes” project envisaged the construction of two plants on the site of the former Carling coking plant in the Chemesis industrial park. The plans included a pre-treatment plant which was to clean, sort and prepare 145,000 tonnes a year of plastic waste from different sources for various molecular and mechanical recycling processes.
In a second plant, the waste PET would have been depolymerised using the "Infinite Loop” process developed by Loop Industries. The resulting monomers MEG and DMT would then have been purified and polymerised again to make new PET. The facility was to be designed to produce up to 70,000 tonnes per year of recycled PET. The project partners said at the time that the recycled PET would have same quality as primary material and would be suitable for use in food-contact applications.
