VTT has announced the licensing of its mixed plastic recycling technology, Olefy, to US-based company Refinity, which develops and commercialises new waste recovery technologies.
VTT has sold a global license of its chemical recycling technology for mixed plastic waste to Refinity, a new subsidiary of Innventure Inc. Refinity says it intends to use the technology to commercialize a process to profitably recycle even poor-quality plastic waste into plastics that are of the same quality as new products. The company adds that these materials are suitable for use in the food and pharmaceutical industries, for example.
VTT’s technology directly converts unsorted mixed plastic waste into raw materials for the petrochemical industry, including ethylene and propene. The process is said to improve the opportunities to use plastic waste that isn’t suited for mechanical recycling and is currently sent to landfills or burned to generate energy.
Refinity intends to scale up the technology and deploy it in new commercial plastic waste recycling facilities. Dow will reportedly provide technical resources to support the process design and implementation and work with Refinity to find locations for future commercial production.
Apparently, the Olefy technology has been demonstrated at pilot scale at the VTT Bioruukki pilot centre in Espoo, Finland.
“VTT and Refinity will continue to optimize the technology for various raw material streams unsuitable for mechanical recycling and support the upscaling of the process to industrial production. It will be great to see our researchers’ work proceed to commercial use in the next few years,” comments Jarmo Ropponen, vice president of Industrial Chemistry at VTT.
Last summer VTT began an initiative to pioneer low-carbon water-efficient technology, said to have the potential to reduce water consumption by up to 90% and overall energy consumption by more than half. The initiative aims to address the challenges of energy and resource consumption in the forestry and textile industry.
Towards the end of 2024, the company developed a new technology for cardboard shaping to create reel-to-reel origami-inspired structures for fibre-based packaging materials, in collaboration with Aalto University and Finnish industrial partners. According to VTT, the structures’ light weight and durability provide a visually appealing alternative to conventional protective packing materials like plastic and expanded polystyrene.
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