LyondellBasell chief focused on cutting industry’s plastic
About 10 million metric tons of singleuse plastic — the kind that holds our beverages and takeout food — end up in the world’s oceans each year, scientists say, killing or injuring all kinds of sea life.
Faced with such a fact, Bob Patel, CEO of Houston plastics giant LyondellBasell, says the company is making strides to address the issue head on.
“It’s absolutely unacceptable that plastic waste ends up in oceans, or in the environment in general,” said Patel. “And, therefore, a lot of our work has been around recycling.”
Waste has become a top priority for the plastics industry and its main supplier, the petrochemical industry. The petrochemical plants along the Gulf Coast churn out thousands of tons of tiny plastic pellets
each day to be turned into items ranging from bottles to vehicle bumpers. With that comes a waste stream that has exceeded society’s ability to manage it.
The United States generates more than 35 million tons of plastics a year, a fraction of the 70 billion tons of plastics made around the world, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“Fundamentally, we need to make less plastic because there are enormous health and environmental issues associated with making plastic,” said Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, a Vermont-based environmental advocacy project. For example, ethylene is turned into polyethylene resin, a common plastic. Because the process uses enormous amounts of energy, its carbon dioxide emissions are substantial.
In 2018, the U.S. dumped 27 million tons of plastic into landfills while recycling 3 million tons, according to the EPA. Plastics can take hundreds or thousands of years to decompose, and, in the meantime, can wreak havoc on the environment.
Patel, with executives from Dow Chemical, Clariant Corp. and other companies that make, use, sell, process, collect and recycle plastics, in 2019 launched the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, which pledges to spend $1.5 billion over five years to develop and accelerate solutions that minimize and manage plastic waste.
Circular economy
LyondellBasell, with Michigan’s Dow Chemical and Calgary-based Nova Chemicals, also is putting money into the Closed Loop Circular Plastics Fund. The companies last month made a $25 million investment in the Closed Loop Circular Plastics Fund to update and modernize facilities and equipment that would source, process and return hard-to-recycle plastics to supply chains in the U.S. and Canada.
LyondellBasell in its
2020 sustainability report outlined a plan to produce and market 2 million metric tons of recycled and renewable-based polymers each year by 2030.
As part of the effort, the company in April launched a suite of products under the name Circulen. LyondellBasell has implemented a three-pronged approach to advance the circular economy, which helps reduce plastic waste through the use of recycled content,
including mechanical recycling, molecular recycling and renewable feedstocks.
The company’s mechanical recycling includes sorting plastic waste, washing and grinding it, remelting the waste, adding additives and rubber and creating new recycled plastics. The new material can be polyethylene, used in plastic bags and films, and polypropylene.
LyondellBasell also owns 50 percent of Quality Circular
Polymers, a 2018 jointventure with Suez, a European waste handling company that can recycle 55,000 tons per year. The plant turns common household products made of polypropylene and highdensity polyethylene, including laundry detergent bottles, into plastic pellets.
The company also partnered with Samsonite in 2019 to create the luggagemaker’s S’Cure ECO luggage collection from recycled plastic waste.
Global effort
Patel hopes to expand mechanical recycling around the globe.
“Fast forward three or four years from now, and I think it’s very likely we will have recycling plants in the U.S., China, possibly India, and hopefully other parts of the world,” Patel said.
Patel also hopes to grow LyondellBasell’s molecular recycling, or chemical recycling, project into a global powerhouse. The process breaks down plastics into their original molecules for
re-use in other applications.
LyondellBasell in September 2020 started an experimental molecular recycling facility in northern Italy. The MoReTec facility breaks down plastic waste, returning it to its molecular form and used as feedstock for new plastic materials such as food packaging and health care items.
LyondellBasell worked with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany to develop a molecular recycling technology, called MoReTec, which uses a catalyst to break down plastics on the molecular level more quickly and efficiently than traditional chemical recycling technologies.
The new plastic products help combat the global glut of plastic waste that threatens the future of the petrochemical industry.
As the company continues to develop its molecular recycling program, Patel said, he hopes it can recycle as much as 400,000 tons of waste every year. Mechanical recycling
plants, by comparison, recycle 50,000 pounds per year.
“My hope is that we’re building molecular recycling plants in Europe and Houston by the middle of the decade and, by the second half of the decade, we’ll build dozens of those around the world,” Patel said.
The company’s third pillar is bio-based feedstocks.
In April 2019, LyondellBasell began producing plastics using renewable raw materials such as cooking and vegetable oil waste, for use in food packaging, toys and furniture.
These products, marketed under the brands Circulen and Circulen Plus, offer the same high-quality properties as virgin plastics and meet regulatory requirements.
It is too early to say exactly what percentage of LyondellBasell’s business will come from this technology, Patel said, but the company may eventually license it.