Toronto, Ontario — BASF and New Energy have both signed an agreement that is part of the BASF ChemCycling project that chemically repurposes post-consumer plastic waste.
The focus of the project is to repurpose the use of mixed plastic waste, which would otherwise end up in landfill or incineration. And–with New Energy as a partner, they are providing BASF with pyrolysis oil from end-of-life tires as an additional raw material source to create commercial products.
“So far, there was no technology that allowed the recycling of pyrolysis oil from tires into a high value application. By further broadening our raw material base to waste tires, we can create a new circular value stream,” explained Dr. Christian Lach, project leader of ChemCycling at BASF. “Moreover, we establish a second recycled feedstock in our ChemCycling project with which we can manufacture high-performance products for our customers’ demanding applications.”
“We are proud that our technology provides value to BASF, and through this collaboration to their customers. We spent almost a decade to develop and optimize our technology and are now successfully operating an industrial-scale plant which turns waste tires into secondary raw materials. This puts us at the forefront when it comes to establishing a circular economy for tires.” Said Viktor Varadi, CEO of New Energy.
BASF feeds the pyrolysis oil, supplied by New Energy, into it’s Verbund integration site, thereby replacing fossil resources. The share of recycled raw material is allocated to certain products manufactured in Verbund by using a third-party audited mass balance approach (Verbund is the physical integration of production, market platforms and technologies).
“The collaboration with New Energy underlines BASF’s ambition to use recycled raw materials in the chemical industry and lead the transition to a circular economy for plastics,” said Lach. “Partnerships with agile, innovative companies are key to achieving these ambitions. We are happy that we have found such a partner in New Energy, in addition to our partnership with Quantafuel that will soon supply us with pyrolysis oil derived from mixed plastic waste from their commercial scale plant in Skive, Denmark.”
BASF ChemCycling project was started in 2018 and in 2020 the companies first commercial products were in the market.
