Giving new value to plastic waste
Thanks to its numerous applications and practical use, plastic is one of the world’s most used materials.
However, only 8% of the plastic used is coming from recycling, highlighting the bottlenecks in existing plastic recycling value chain and leading to environmental and resource concerns.
In answer to end-of-life plastics concerns, Axens offers innovative technologies to complement and overcome conventional mechanical recycling limitations by converting plastic waste into more valuable chemical substances and products suitable for the highest demands of the market.
Plastic Recycling Brochure
Turning plastic waste into valuable products
To satisfy multiple usage, plastic solutions as packaging became more and more complex, including multi layers, new additives, dyes, pigments…
Adding to this complexity, the new legislation banning the utilization of specific compounds in new plastics makes plastic recycling a real challenge.
The conventional recycling industry is looking for solutions to handle this complexity.
Axens, leveraging its recycling chemical process expertise, can assist the recycling industry in evaluating the optimum solution to cope with those changes in market demand and legislation.
Petrochemical actors shall have an important role to play in the plastic recycling value chain to face the increasing demand for recycling material incorporation from brand owners and to meet governments regulatory measures.
However, processing waste plastics in existing assets is challenging.
Taking advantage of Axens extensive experience and knowhow in hydrocarbon purification, Axens is committed to offer services and robust solutions to accompany petrochemical actors into this transition.
Quality of recycled products is of prime importance, especially when addressing food or medical packaging markets.
Technologies developed and commercialized by Axens aim at producing recycled plastics that are identical to those produced from virgin oil and therefore meet the highest demands of the market.
Get more from your plastic waste
A promising route to recycle mixed plastics is thermal pyrolysis but the pyrolysis oils contain too many impurities to be sent directly to the Steam Cracker without significant risks.
Rewind® Mix is the unique solution to purify pyrolysis oils and meet stringent Steam Cracker specifications avoiding abnormal turndown or catalyst deactivation.
Thanks to the partnership with Plastic Energy, Axens can also propose and license the TAC process.
Suitable for a wide range of plastic pyrolysis oils
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.
To do so, Axens has used its large experience in hydrocarbon purification and waste recycling to develop Rewind® PET. In addition, Axens has built a strong expertise in feedstock characterization using the most advanced analytic technics such as 2D-GC. Axens experts then have processed numerous representative pyrolysis oil from several suppliers in pilot units to assess performances of the process and catalyst, and carefully analyzed and qualified the purified oil produced.
Fully integrated solution
Rewind® Mix will generally be located in a petrochemical 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 idle assets to minimize project costs but also to study greenfield project.
Rely on proven technologies
Rewind® Mix innovative patented scheme relies on the combination of technology bricks coming from Axens expertise and industrial experience from hydrocarbon purification.
Each technology brick used in the Rewind® Mix technology has already been fully demonstrated at industrial scale and uses industrial ready catalysts.
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 upcoming European directive and new ratio targets, PET recycled demand is clearly outpacing availability.
Rewind® PET is one of the answer to the European directive and market pressure, converting any waste PET into food contact as virgin PET.
Feed versatility
Today, almost only part of the clear and light blue sorted PET is recycled back to packaging, while the colored, opaque and trays waste PET is valorized in non‐food packaging application.
Using eco-efficient glycolysis to depolymerize PET into its monomers and thanks to the proprietary purification section, RewindTM 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 European directive and market demand for food contact recycled plastic.
Food grade compatibility
Waste PET include 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.
Eco-efficient solution
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 RewindTM PET.
Results show a significant positive impact on all the environment aspects we have studied, and in particular on CO2 emissions that is reduced by 50% for PET made from Rewind™ PET compared to fossil route.
10 years of experience
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 - Commercial Bulletin
Rewind® Mix - Commercial Bulletin
TAC Process - Commercial Bulletin
700 Series Catalysts - Commercial Bulletin
Towards Circularity for all Plastics
Learn more on how to give new value to plastic waste
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Our Expertise
The petrochemical industry includes a large array of intermediate products that have a wide variety of uses. Axens has developed and provided a wide range of solutions in olefins and pyrolysis gasoline purification issued from steam crackers and in aromatics production and separation.
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.
Axens technologies are backed by the strong knowhow and expertise of IFP Energies nouvelles (IFPEN), a major research player in the fields of energy, transport and environment.
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.
Within the objective to minimize the time to market and develop fine-tuned solutions that fits industrial needs, Axens is sealing strategic alliances pushing for circular economy development.
Rewind® PET is the result of the 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 the partnership with Plastic Energy, Axens can also propose the Thermal Anaerobic Conversion process.
Resources you might be interested in
Axens, IFPEN and JEPLAN announce the launch of the commercialization by Axens of the Rewind® PET chemical recycling process
Oil Refining
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
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