Chemical recycling: CirculenRevive
Chemical recycling: CirculenRevive
At LYB, we’re committed to helping build a circular economy aligned with our customers’ sustainability goals. CirculenRevive is our game-changing chemical recycling solution, complementing our mechanical recycling solutions by addressing the challenge of hard-to-recycle plastics not easily processed by other recycling technologies.
Chemical recycling technologies break plastic waste down to its molecular building blocks, which can be reintroduced into the polymer production process as a drop-in feedstock. This approach helps divert plastic waste from incinerators, landfills or the environment while delivering high-performance end products.
CirculenRevive solutions use an ISCC PLUS - certified mass balance approach to produce polymers with up to 100% attributed circular content. The high-quality polymer products perform like virgin resin while reducing fossil-based feedstock use. Brand owners can confidently make sustainability claims while maintaining technical performance for highly regulated applications.
Our proprietary chemical recycling MoReTec technology converts post-consumer mixed plastic waste into new polymer feedstock with over 80% plastic-to-plastic yield.1 Our production processes can run on renewable energy and use an energy-efficient catalytic process. The result: CirculenRevive solutions with a 50% lower carbon footprint than fossil-based alternatives.2
Advancing MoReTec technology for commercial scalability
LYB brings decades of catalyst innovation to advancing sustainable technologies. We’re driving circularity through the development of our proprietary chemical recycling MoReTec technology at our Ferrara, Italy site and the construction of our MoReTec-1 plant in Cologne, Germany. The MoReTec-1 plant will convert post-consumer mixed plastic waste at scale into pyrolysis oil and gas — valuable feedstocks for producing new polymers.
At LYB, our integrated ecosystem model aims to enhance scale and value by co-locating recycling and polymer production facilities. Through strategic investments, we are working to combine advanced sorting, mechanical recycling and chemical recycling with our existing polymer production capabilities to maximize circularity, improve traceability and support the scalability of our CirculenRevive solutions.
1Yield depending on the quality of the waste plastic feedstock. We define yield as the percentage by weight of the waste plastic (with >85% polyolefin feed) fed to the process that is converted into liquid and gaseous products (pyrolysis oil and pyrolysis gas) that can be used to produce new polyolefins.
2Feedstocks produced via the MoReTec process (pyrolysis oil and gas) displace fossil-based feedstocks in the olefins cracking process; the stated carbon footprint reduction is based on a comparison of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results for (1) pyrolysis oil and gas produced by the MoReTec technology, and (2) fossil-based naphtha feedstock. LCA for pyrolysis oil and gas based on MoReTec pilot plant data. LCA for fossil-based naphtha includes carbon emissions associated with the production of fossil-based naphtha feedstock, plus incineration of the equivalent amount of mixed plastic waste required to produce pyrolysis oil and gas via the MoReTec process.
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