Less than 20% of plastic waste is recycled in Europe. The rest ends up in landfills or is incinerated. In this context, the EU-funded eLECTRO project will demonstrate new technology that convert mixed waste plastic (MPW) to recycled feedstock for petrochemical industries to provide a sustainable and scalable circular solution with a low carbon footprint for olefin and polyolefin production. eLECTRO will prioritise chemically recycling MPW streams that are not suitable for mechanical recycling by combining an innovative modular extruder for the optimal pre-treatment of MPW with an electrically heated reactor for the catalytic pyrolysis of plastic waste. The main product, MPW pyrolysis oil, will be used as a feed for steam crackers. The project will test the technology using waste streams from the Republics of Korea and Indonesia. In order to overcome several achievements and progresses, the EU project eLECTRO, or “Electrified conversion of MPW into olefins and downstream integration”, has started on September 2022.
The main objective of the eLECTRO project is to demonstrate a revolutionary technology concept that recycle and link MPO to petrochemical industry and provides them with a sustainable, low GHG footprint and scalable circular solution for olefin and polyolefin production.
It resulted in seven sub-objectives:
• Demonstrate eLECTRO’s integrated waste to olefin process at TRL 7,
• Leverage eLECTRO’s electrified value chain to reduce CO2 emissions by 90%,
• Maximize renewable energy use through electrification and grid integration,
• Guide eLECTRO’s scalability to economically viable valorization of 200 kta MPW,
• Replicability by considering MPW streams from different EU countries (e.g. Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands), Korea and Indonesia and assessing key locations for eLECTRO circular hubs,
• Dissemination, learning and training next generation Waste management engineers,
• Closing the full cycle by transforming MPW back into materials (polyolefins).
To reach these objectives, eLECTRO brings together 12 European partners and 1 extra-European partner (Figure 1): Industrials, small and medium enterprises, research institutes and universities working on the 7 independent Work Packages. Besides the “Ethics requirements”, the “Project management”, and the “Dissemination, training, exploitation and communication”, all the other Work Packages are technical. They correspond to the whole chain of plastic recycling starting from the MPW collection and supply up to the downstream integration (Figure 2).
