LyondellBasell has announced the cooperation with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) to advance the chemical recycling of plastic materials and assist the global efforts towards the circular economy and plastic waste recycling needs.

The focus of the venture is to develop a new catalyst and process technology to decompose post-consumer plastic waste, such as packaging into monomers for reuse in polymerisation processes.

“Earlier this year we announced a 50 percent share in Quality Circular Polymers (QCP) to drive the development of high quality recycled polyolefins from the mechanical recycling of sorted post-consumer waste streams,” said Bob Patel, Chief Executive Office of LyondellBasell.

“This new cooperation will be a major step towards chemical recycling and extend our contribution to the circular economy.”

Chemical recycling can manage multilayer and hybrid plastic materials, which can’t be easily recovered by mechanical recycling.

“We are complementing our leading competencies in catalyst and process technologies in cooperation with KIT, to create a new and complete plastic waste molecular recycling process,” said Massimo Covezzi, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at LyondellBasell.

“The goal is to develop a high efficiency and clean plastic depolymerisation process, through catalyst innovation, to transform plastic waste back to the chemical building blocks.