Developing chemical recycling with value chain partners

Neste aims to advance chemical recycling

Neste creates solutions to combat climate change and accelerate a shift to a circular economy. The company refines waste, residues and innovative raw materials into renewable fuels and more sustainable feedstock for plastics and other materials.

Neste is committed to becoming a solution provider for chemical recycling of hard-to-recycle plastic waste. The key target is to enable a reduction of the use of virgin fossil resources in polymers and chemicals production and to accelerate the shift to a circular economy for plastics, to also combat plastic waste pollution by adding value to waste.

The company’s approach to chemical recycling is the processing of liquefied waste plastic: waste plastic is liquefied e.g. via pyrolysis or hydrothermal liquefaction and afterwards upgraded and processed in Neste’s conventional refinery in Porvoo, Finland. The output is high-quality feedstock for the polymers and chemicals industry. A drop-in solution, the feedstock can be used to produce virgin-quality polymers, eligible for just the same applications as conventional, fossil-based polymers.

The company has successfully concluded several series of trial runs processing liquefied waste plastic in Finland. After kicking the series off with a first industrial scale trial run with liquefied waste plastic in 2020, Neste has conducted additional runs in the following years, processing a total of more than 6,000 tons of liquefied waste plastic into high-quality feedstock for polymers.

In the course of the company’s chemical recycling project PULSE (“Pretreatment and Upgrading of Liquefied waste plastic to Scale up circular Economy”), Neste is currently targeting the capacity to process 150,000 tons of liquefied waste plastic per year by building a respective upgrading unit at its refinery in Porvoo, Finland. The construction of the upgrading unit is expected to be finished in 2025.

Neste accelerating circularity with value chain partners

In 2023, Neste cooperated with Uponor, Wastewise and Borealis. The partners successfully produced pipes made of cross-linked polyethylene (PEX) which was based on feedstock gained from chemically recycled post-industrial waste plastic from PEX pipe production, using the International Sustainability Carbon Certification (ISCC) PLUS certified mass-balancing approach, which makes it possible to track the amount and sustainability characteristics of circular and/or bio-based content in the value chain and attribute it based on verifiable bookkeeping.

Recently, Neste completed a life cycle assessment (LCA) on the environmental impacts of chemical recycling as incorporated into the plastics value chain. It concludes that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as well as virgin fossil resource use can be significantly reduced if chemical recycling is incorporated into plastics value chains to avoid incineration of plastic waste and replace fossil feedstock use with recycled feedstock in the production of polymers.