PureCycle Technologies, in partnership with consumer goods company P&G, hosted a ribbon-cutting for a plant that will restore used polypropylene (PP) plastic to ‘virgin-like’ quality with a recycling method that is one of a kind. The new plant will enable consumers to purchase more products made from recycled plastic.
The patented technology was born in P&G labs as one of many innovations with meaningful sustainability benefits. P&G licensed the technology to PureCycle, a portfolio company of Innventure, a Wasson Enterprise Partnership that commercializes disruptive technologies.
Founded in 2015, PureCycle is opening a small scale plant in Lawrence County, Ohio where they will test and calibrate the PP recycling process. The small scale plant will begin operating in January 2018, and the full scale plant will open in 2020.
The global PP market is valued at more than $80 billion, according to Transparency Market research, and is on track to reach $133.3 billion by 2023. PP is used in automobile interiors, food and beverage packaging, consumer good packaging, electronics, construction materials, home furnishings, and many other products.
“Our approach to innovation not only includes products and packaging, but technologies that allow us and others to have a positive impact on our environment. This technology, which can remove virtually all contaminants and colors from used plastic, has the capacity to revolutionize the plastics recycling industry by enabling P&G and companies around the world to tap into sources of recycled plastics that deliver nearly identical performance and properties as virgin materials in a broad range of applications,” said Kathy Fish, P&G’s chief technology officer.
“In the U.S. alone, the demand for virgin quality recycled PP is immense. The Association of Plastics Recyclers (APR) has identified 1 billion pounds of recycled PP demand in North America alone. 720 million pounds of that demand is for ‘high-quality’ recycled PP,” said Steve Alexander, chief executive officer of the APR.
While this is a P&G-developed technology, the recycled PP will be widely available for purchase across industries.
Published in the October 2017 Edition of American Recycler News
