Encina, Blue Planet sign feedstock agreement for chemical recycling

Iranpolymer/Baspar Texas-based Encina and Singapore’s waste management company Blue Planet have signed a memorandum of understanding for the supply of hard-to-recycle plastic waste.

Blue Planet will supply feedstock for Encina’s circular chemicals manufacturing facilities in the Americas, Saudi Arabia, India, and Southeast Asia. The chemical recycler said all such facilities are currently in ‘early phases of development’.

Blue Planet will source the feedstock from its network of material recovery facilities in India, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, UK, and Switzerland. The companies expect their partnership will divert 2.6 million tonnes of plastic waste from landfill annually.

Blue Planet’s reputation as a pioneer in sustainable waste management solutions makes them an ideal partner for Encina. Equally important, we share a common goal: to create products and solutions that support global decarbonisation and advance sustainability,” said David Roesser, Chief Executive Officer of Encina.

Encina said the final products of its pyrolysis-based chemical recycling process will all be ISCC-Plus certified. The company uses a proprietary catalytic process to convert post-consumer scrap plastic to valuable circular chemical products. The process, called Plastic Fluid Catalytic Cracking (PFCC), converts mixed hard-to-recycle plastics into petrochemical feedstock such as light olefins and BTX aromatics. These can be used as feedstock materials by plastics producers to produce new polymers after having been tested and ISCC-Plus certified by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM).

In 2022, Encina announced plans to build a 450,000 tonnes/year pyrolysis plant in Pennsylvania, United States. Its construction plans were delayed after receiving two technical deficiency letters from the Department of Environmental Protection. In April 2024, Encina cancelled plans to build the plant, citing ‘need for more scale’.

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