VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd announces its plan to spin out a new company – Olefy Technologies. Its patent-pending technology reportedly can extract over 70% virgin grade plastics and chemical raw materials components from plastic waste. The new process can be done in a single step, majorly reducing the cost of plastic recycling and making recycling a preferred option for massive amounts of landfill-bound plastic waste that current methods are unable to process.
Today, only 8% – 10% of global plastics gets recycled primarily through mechanical recycling. However, only a limited share of plastic waste can be mechanically recycled. Furthermore, the resulting recycled plastic cannot be used in food packaging and pharma applications. Most plastic waste ends up in landfills. The opportunity to get virgin quality plastic from previously unusable plastic waste means that with Olefy it is economically viable to recycle most of the world’s plastics with minimal sorting by consumers and businesses, according to VTT.
“Plastic waste is one of the five major global problems that VTT has strategically set itself to solve,” says Antti Vasara, CEO of VTT, in a press release from the company. “Olefy is a quantum leap in recycling that will change the way the world views plastic by making it truly circular and guiding us towards carbon neutrality even faster.”
A major advantage of the virgin quality materials produced from the Olefy process reportedly enables plastic to be recycled an infinite number of times. With the Olefy process, it takes the same amount of ethylene or propylene based waste plastic as higher-cost naphtha feedstock to produce a ton of virgin grade plastic material. At the same time, the process itself lowers the cost of production of recycled plastic so significantly that it can lower the bar for global companies to use it as a higher percentage of recycled material in their products and packaging, according to VTT.
Read the press release at: www.vtt.fi
