Neste has successfully commissioned a new upgrading facility for liquefied waste plastic at its refinery in Porvoo, Finland – expecting to reach an annual capacity of up to 150,000 tons of feedstock for the plastics and chemical industries.
The new facility is designed to process crude oils and liquefied plastic waste from challenging streams, including mixed plastic waste, contaminated plastics, and multi-layer packaging. A mass balance approach is applied to attribute the recycled raw materials used to the recycled Neste RE product.
According to a life cycle assessment, using recycled Neste RE reduces abiotic depletion, or virgin fossil resource consumption, by over 70%. Furthermore, chemically recycling plastic waste, then using it to replace fossil feedstock in plastics manufacturing, is thought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 35%.
Neste also expects its crude liquefied plastic waste to match the quality of the drop-in raw materials required by the petrochemical industry.
Following Neste’s €111 million investment, the upgraded facility is described as the ‘world’s largest’ for liquefied plastic waste. Construction began in 2023 and was completed at the end of 2025.
This year, Neste has taken action to ramp up its production, which is hoped to increase in line with market and legislation developments.
“The successful commissioning proves that we can process liquefied waste plastic at an industrial scale,” says Jori Sahlsten, executive vice president of Oil Products at Neste. “This achievement demonstrates Neste’s capability to develop advanced technology, set safety standards, and create new supply chains for challenging new raw materials.
“We are proud of this achievement, and I want to express my sincere thanks to our partners and employees whose dedication has allowed us to turn this vision into a reality.”
“We enable the scale-up of chemical recycling by upgrading liquefied plastic waste,” adds Maiju Helin, director of Polymers and Chemicals at Neste. “The plastic originates from low-quality waste streams not suitable for mechanical recycling and destined for incineration or landfills.
“Thanks to our new facility, even hard-to-recycle plastic waste can be upgraded to meet the feedstock quality requirements of companies manufacturing high-quality plastics. However, the current European Commission’s calculation rules on recycled content in the Single Use Plastics Directive threaten to limit the ability of refineries to serve EU’s recycled content targets.
“For Europe’s competitiveness sake, we need to ensure the calculation rules are amended to include refineries in the context of the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation.”
Alongside its partners Alterra and Technip Energies, Neste also licenses liquefaction technology for chemical recycling of hard-to-recycle plastics.
In other news, Indaver has recently invested €105 million into its Plastics2Chemicals installation in Antwerp, which is now producing chemically recycled raw materials for ‘virgin quality’ packaging applications. Indaver now anticipates an annual capacity of 26kT.
Since then, PolyCycl has received Series A investment from Rainmatter by Zerodha to deploy its technology for recycling low-grade plastic waste into feedstock. PolyCycl’s patented chemical recycling technology platform turns plastic waste, including single-use polythene bags, into liquid hydrocarbon oils to be used as feedstock in further material production, including food-grade virgin plastics.
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