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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ChemPET (Industrial scale PET chemical recycling plant based on innovative glycolysis process)

Teaser

Summary

The object of this project has been to develop properly a strategy for the industrial success of Garboâ€™s ChemPET project.
During the 3 months of Phase1 ChemPET team worked on the 3 focus aspects: Technical, Commercial and Financial.
Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is a thermoplastic Polymer with a market, recording 4% to 5% growth each year, represents a world production of 64 million tons(Mt) split between fibers (43 Mt), bottles (15M), films and packaging (6 Mt).
ChemPET technology aims to boost the recycle of PET plastics introducing a chemical process that can overtake the common problems that afflict the mechanical recycling of plastics and commercialize a truly green recycled PET.
The idea behind ChemPET project comes from more than 15 years of Garbo activity in glycols regeneration, filtration and purification technology; ChemPET project will allow the recycle of PET plastics with many different kind of contaminations and specification providing a real solution to reach European recycle targets and creating an opportunity of sustainability for the European PET value chain that will benefit from being more environmentally and economically sustainable.
During these 3 months ChemPET team focused the attention on improving purification technology in two important and difficult-to-recycle PET waste categories: Opaque PET bottles and multi-layer PET Trays. Recyclability and sustainability of these two kind of waste represent the most important challenge for the stakeholders of the PET supplying chain.
The commercial and financial aspects were focused on improving ChemPET echo in the PET producers and users industry focusing in browsing the market and obtain important partnership agreement.
As conclusion ChemPET team designed the roadmap for the following year with the aim to build up the first industrial process plant in the second half of 2018.

Work performed

During the phase 1 project we deeply analyzed the potential grow of ChemPET project. The PET market, recording a 5% growth each year, impose to the various stakeholders to pay close attention to the issue of its sustainability; policy makers are pushing to raise up the recycling rates by upgrading the disposal collection and increasing peopleâ€™s sensibility in environmental aspects.
Its mechanical and chemical characteristics and its recyclability, not only in the packaging market but also in textile one, put the PET in the position of achieve ever greater market share; it is estimate that the ChemPET development â€“ in terms of ton of waste recycled - will grow at a rate higher than the market demand.
ChemPET team focused the attention on the industrial deployment of the project; we decided to split the industrial application in different step to better suited the developing of the technology, to achieve an higher quality output material. In the beginning, we will process waste coming basically from post industrial users, with medium rate contaminations, but higher value added thus no recycle is applicable at this moment; the second step will improve pre-treatment process allowing ChemPET to use waste coming also from post-consumer users.
The team also performed a technical engineering layout with potential supplier that can follow ChemPET business idea and customize the requested equipment. In this field the 20-years Garbo experience in chemical plants based all the technical study.
On the commercial and financial field the team performed an analysis of the competitor and FTO analysis knowing that ChemPET technology is few steps ahead of the main competitors and the PET recycling is having a huge concernment in chemical industry. In phase 2 budget Garbo will allocate resources to patent the technology developed in these years.
Concluding the analysis ChemPETâ€™s team discovered that many projects are in developing for determine a solution to plastic waste issue, but ChemPET is the only real industrial application that can boost the markets issue giving to policy makers a true industrial solution for a problem that is feel as a global riddle.

Final results

Garboâ€™s ChemPET will be the first industrial application of PET chemical recycling, providing a flow production of virgin specs PET using plastic waste. Garbo facility will benefit from this new business model that will use and upgrade part of the existing equipment and create new jobs.
The idea of business model is to start with industrial plant erection in second half 2018 and reach full capacity of 100-ton product per day in end of 2019. The first industrial step will be brought on in Cerano (Novara) site; this location is selected to be the future innovation center about plastic recycling, to test new PET recycling developments. The plan 2019-2022 aims to replicate the Cerano model in other plants sites located all around Europe where the wastes are available, involving important partners and stakeholders already in the PET value chain.
The evolution of ChemPET business model in Cerano plant will not stop as reached the full capacity, but will ensure also the utilization of filtration by-product as waste-to-energy by gasification to undertake the energy independence of the production site and increase the sustainability of the overall business.
Concluding, the view that ChemPET got about PET, is to achieve a complete circular economy ensuring virgin like specifications, waste valorization, local job creation and replicability of the business model.