South Korean chemicals firm SK Geo Centric (SKGC) and Canadian chemicals recycler Loop Industries have signed a joint-venture agreement to set up a depolymerization facility in South Korea.
The facility will be the latest addition to SKGC’s Ulsan Advanced Recycling Cluster in Ulsan, South Korea, and is expected to open in 2025. It will have a plastic recycling production capacity of 70,000 ton/year SKGC and Loop have a 51:49 split in the joint venture, which is the third of its type between the companies.
SKGC and Loop are targeting building three depolymerization plants in Asia by 2030 in response to increasing demand for recycled polymers.
Over the past several years, chemical producers are building and expanding facilities to convert used plastics into feedstocks for new plastics, chemicals and other raw materials for manufacturing, said Jonathan Katz in a report for Chemical Processing.The number of chemical recycling plants continues to grow. In January, PureCycle Technologies Inc. announced it will build its first polypropylene recycling facility in Belgium that expects to be operational by 2024.
SKGC and Loop also are working with French environmental utility Suez to build a recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET) facility in Saint-Avold, France, aiming for the 70,000 ton/year rPET facility to be fully operational by 2027.
UK-based pyrolysis technology supplier Plastic Energy also is partnering with SKGC to build a pyrolysis plant at the Ulsan complex. SKGC estimates the plant will have a processing capacity of 66,000 ton/year of plastic waste. Operations are expected to launch in the second half of 2025.
