Facing End-Of-Life Plastic Challenge
As stakeholders in the public sector, waste management, regulatory bodies, and industry, you face significant challenges in managing end-of-life plastics.
The complexity of recycling mixed plastics, meeting regulatory requirements, and achieving high-quality recycled materials are just a few of the hurdles you encounter.
Axens recognizes these challenges, and helps you select the optimum pathways to complement mechanical recycling, ensuring all plastic wastes can be transformed into new plastics. Our experts also guide you in assessing each solution’s impact on the overall life cycle assessment of plastic products.
Rewind® Solutions
From the end of plastic’s life to its new beginning, see how Rewind® solutions allow a more sustainable plastic value chain.
Maximizing Plastic Resources
No More Hard-to-Recycle Plastics
Explore our complete portfolio of recycling pathways, including dissolution, depolymerization, and thermal conversion associated with performance guarantees and technical support throughout the entire plant lifecycle.
High-Quality and Sustainable Products
By integrating our solutions, you can enhance your sustainability efforts, meet regulatory standards, and achieve superior recycling outcomes. Partner with us to drive innovation and efficiency in plastic recycling.
Rewind® Solutions to Fit Every Need
Chemical recycling is crucial for transforming end-of-life plastics that are unsuitable for mechanical recycling due to complexity, quality or variability issues. Rewind® Solutions tackle these challenges head-on, working alongside mechanical recycling to deliver tailored solutions that advance sustainability and accelerate circularity in the industry:
- The pyrolysis pathway—powered by the TAC Process, Rewind Max, and Rewind Mix—targets hard-to-recycle polyolefins, delivering high carbon yields with lower carbon footprint compared to virgin materials.
- Rewind® PET revolutionizes PET recycling by processing challenging materials like opaque and colored bottles, multilayer PET trays, and PET fibers, enabling the creation of PET products with virgin-like quality.
Get More From Plastic Waste
A promising route to recycle mixed plastics is thermal pyrolysis. But the pyrolysis oils contain too many impurities to be sent directly, at scale, to the Steam Cracker without significant detrimental impact on its operation.
Rewind® Mix is the unique solution to purify pyrolysis oils and meet stringent Steam Cracker specifications avoiding abnormal turndown or catalyst deactivation.
Thanks to our partnership with Plastic Energy, Axens can also propose and license the TAC process.
Pyrolysis plants will preferably be located near the feedstocks resources, treating local feedstocks with different quality and composition, using different type of technology. Pyrolysis oils to be treated in the steam cracker will therefore have a versatile composition. With the perspective to provide a robust solution, Rewind® Mix has been developed to be flexible enough to handle with feed composition diversity.
Rewind® Mix will generally be located in a petrochemical or refinery complex to benefit from its existing infrastructures (hydrogen, utilities...).
Therefore, and case by case, Axens is committed to study the feasibility of integration with existing units and/or revamp existing assets to minimize project costs but also to study greenfield projects.
Rewind® Mix innovative patented scheme relies on the combination of technology platforms stemming from Axens expertise and industrial experiences.
Each technology platform composing the Rewind® Mix technology has already been fully proven at industrial scale.
Rewind® Mix technology powers Axens’ pyrolysis pathway, delivering very high carbon yields with a reduced carbon footprint compared to virgin materials.
PET is widely used to produce plastic packaging. However, only around 20% of this material makes its way to recycling plants. The remaining part is either incinerated, disposed, landfilled or leaked into the oceans. Along with an increasing end-consumer pressure for recycling and iInternational regulations for recycled contents, PET recycling demand is clearly outpacing availability.
Rewind® PET is one of the answers to consumers demand for sustainable packaging, regulations emerging globally and producers' commitments, converting any waste PET into food contact as virgin PET.
Today, the only part of the clear and light blue sorted PET is recycled back to packaging, while the colored, opaque and trays waste PET are valorized in non‐food packaging application.
Using eco-efficient glycolysis to depolymerize PET into its monomers and thanks to the proprietary purification section, Rewind® PET allows to upcycle any PET based material including transparent PET, colored PET, opaque PET, mono and multi-layer PET trays, PET fibers...
By proposing to unlock the current PET recycling solutions limitations, Rewind® PET is one of the answers to the local legislations and market demand for food contact recycled plastic.
Waste PET includes any post consumer and post industrial waste PET from food packaging or other applications all colored, opaque bottles and trays that are currently not recycled back to the food packaging usage. These waste PET can finally be integrated into a fully circular solution thanks to Rewind® PET by allowing their revalorization to high quality clear and food grade PET for packaging.
Life Cycle analysis is crucial for the deployment of recycling technologies; Axens has performed a LCA with a third party to compare the impact of producing 1 ton of virgin PET from fossil oil versus producing 1 ton of recycled PET using Rewind™ PET.
Results show a significant positive impact on all the environment aspects we have studied, and in particular on CO₂ emissions that are reduced by 50% for PET made from Rewind™ PET compared to fossil route.
Rewind® PET is the result of a partnership with JEPLAN, a Japanese company that pioneered in PET chemical recycling by starting-up the first industrial unit in 2004 with a capacity of 22 kta.
Thanks to this collaboration, Rewind® PET is backed by more than 10 years of industrial experience.
Rewind® PET gives new life to polyester fibers, supporting the transition to more sustainable fashion industry. The demonstration unit in Japan has showcased the feasibility and reliability of the entire value chain, from textile conditioning, working with partners, to producing high-quality recycled materials.
Rewind® PET converts polyester fibers into high-quality, decolored raw materials, ideal for manufacturing new textile fibers. By closing the loop, it offers a sustainable solution that minimizes waste and promotes a circular economy within the fashion industry.
Documentation
Tailored Solutions and Reliable Expertise
Axens combines expertise, advanced R&D, and strategic partnerships to propose reliable solutions that fit with industrial needs.
Strong Know-How in Petrochemistry
Today, Axens is bringing all its knowledge and expertise to accompany the plastic industry toward more sustainable value chain, focusing on the optimization of resources utilization while minimizing the impact on the environment.
Strong R&D Foundations
In the field of plastic recycling, IFPEN relies on its long-established expertise related to process development to create innovative solutions from laboratory to industrial.
IFPEN has one of the largest pilot fleets in Europe allowing to extrapolate from Lab to industrial units. Axens and IFPEN work closely together during technology development to take advantage of each expertise and knowhow.
Strategic Partnerships
Rewind® PET is the result of our partnership between JEPLAN, a disruptive start-up in circular economy, IFPEN, a recognized R&D center and Axens as a licensor & engineering company.
The development of Rewind® Mix has been conducted jointly by IFPEN and Repsol using pilot test facilities within the two organizations and thanks to our partnership with Plastic Energy, Axens can also propose the Thermal Anaerobic Conversion process.
Upcoming Events
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Resources
How much do you know about plastics and their recyclability?
Video - Axens 700 Series - Catalysts Dedicated to the Hydrotreatment of Pyrolysis Oils and Renewable Fuels
Technical Article - Transforming a refinery unit into a key component of end-of-life plastic circularity
Video - Rewind® PET: Let's Travel to Japan to Get Latest Updates
Technical Article - Transforming a refinery unit into a key component of end-of-life plastic circularity
Technical Article - Innovative Recycling Driving Circularity
Technical Article - Defining a robust plastics recycling pathway
Axens, IFPEN and JEPLAN announce the launch of the commercialization by Axens of the Rewind® PET chemical recycling process
Axens et Toray Films Europe lauréats de France 2030 avec leur projet d’usine de recyclage chimique du PET à Saint-Maurice-de-Beynost (Ain)
Axens, IFPEN and JEPLAN announce the start-up operation of Rewind® PET semi-industrial unit in Japan for the chemical recycling of PET
Axens to begin licensing Plastic Energy’s TAC process for advanced plastic recycling
Get in Touch with Us!
Have questions about our offers and solutions or need assistance? The Axens team is here to help. Just a message away!
