Upcycling with a difference

Closing the loop on plastics circularity can help solve the massive plastics waste issue facing the world today, said Kevin Quast, the Global Business Lead for Plastics Circularity at Honeywell. Honeywell UOP’s UpCycle Process Technology is helping to do precisely that.

Introduced in 2021, Honeywell’s Upcycle Process Technology is an advanced recycling process based on pyrolysis, a technology that, as the world’s largest process licensing organization, Honeywell has used for decades. “Pyrolysis is a core competence for us,” said Kevin Quast, the Global Business Lead for Plastics Circularity at Honeywell. “We've now gone above and beyond just pyrolysis within oil and gas. Advanced recycling fits into our strategy as an organization as we help our customers transform and become more sustainable in their operations.”

Honeywell's UpCycle Process Technology was created within Honeywell's Sustainable Technology Solutions (STS) group, which is part of Honeywell UOP. The company’s deep knowledge of the pyrolysis process spurred the development of the new technology. The company looked at a variety of different business opportunities from an environmental or sustainability perspective, said Quast, and plastics circularity came out as one of the most promising. It is one of a number of areas related to circularity, sustainability, and environmental improvement, including clean hydrogen, carbon sequestration, renewable fuels, and even bioplastics, in which Honeywell is active.

Plastics circularity is an area where considerable gains remain to be made. The past years have seen vast changes in attitudes towards sustainability within the chemical and plastics industry. In the case of plastics recycling, in particular, the pace of change has been heavily influenced by the legislative mandates and targets that have been introduced, ‘especially in Europe’, noted Quast.

These mandates have led to pledges and commitments being made by consumer goods companies aimed at meeting or exceeding the legislative recycling targets. These companies have been joined by others in the industry, including petrochemical corporations, a main customer group for Honeywell UOP, that are undertaking more sustainable and environmentally responsible activities.

“In other words, the mandates not only changed the attitudes within the industry, but it also got companies to truly commit to making a difference, by reducing their carbon footprint, as well as by producing and using recycled content in new products.”

Meanwhile, it has become evident that the various commitments and pledges made by the industry in relation to recycling, may not be met at the current rate and capacity development of the recycling industry. Mechanical recycling alone, said Quast, is not enough.

“You're going to deploy mechanical as much as you possibly can; it's more inexpensive, and it's easier to implement. But the main problem with mechanical recycling is that only certain types of materials can actually be mechanically recycled. Contaminated flexible waste packaging, multi-layered materials used in frozen food bag packaging, for example, and films and pouches cannot be mechanically recycled. Even when it comes to aseptic TetraPak containers, which are made from paper, plastic and metal, we see that the paper and the metal are separated and recycled, but not the plastic,” he explained. “So, when it comes to advanced recycling, I am obviously not talking about the kind of rigid containers and packaging that can be easily sorted, washed and cost effectively mechanically recycled; that should be very clear.”

However, in cases where mechanical recycling falls short, advanced recycling can provide a solution. The technology can process hard-to-recycle, sometimes highly contaminated plastic waste, turning this into a feedstock which can ultimately be used to create virgin-quality plastics suitable for sensitive food contact or medical applications.

“We saw that this was a way for us to complement mechanical recycling, increase the amount of waste plastic actually being recycled and returned to circulation,” said Quast.

For the process to become economically viable, a constant supply of feedstock must be secured. To that end, Honeywell has entered into several non-binding agreements with waste management companies that are active in the waste/ waste treatment and or waste collection/waste trading industries: companies with access to and knowledge of the waste feed.

“In the US, after being picked up, almost all household waste is taken to a MRF – a material recovery facility – where it is sorted. Here’s where a lot of the recyclable waste is sorted out that then goes to be mechanically recycled. It's the rest, the plastics that don’t get sorted out from organics and other waste that we are targeting,” Quast explained.

Globally, however, the emergence of advanced recycling and its need for feedstock has caused disquiet among mechanical recyclers, particularly in countries with advanced mechanical systems and infrastructure in place. Their concerns that the technology will encroach on the feedstock supply are understandable but unnecessary and are something advanced recyclers must work to allay.

“It's an education point. We, as an industry – including waste management companies, the petrochemical industry, the technology providers—we, as players within the space - need to work together and educate one another that mechanical recycling and advanced recycling are complementary. We are not in competition,” he clarified.

He also noted that, with the price point for the sorted plastic going to the mechanical recyclers, it made no sense for this to be processed chemically. Only in areas where there are no good sortation facilities will material of that quality end up being chemically processed, or in cases where the material has already been through a number of recycling cycles and is too degraded to undergo another.

“In general, we haven’t reached that tipping point yet in the industry,” said Quast. “At some point, we might be able to take material that can no longer be mechanically recycled and, instead of sending it to landfill or incinerating it, process it through our Upcycle technology. We could  break it back down to the base chemical level to create new feedstock for new plastic.”

While pyrolysis is a well-known, long-practiced technology, Honeywell UOP’s Upcycle technology differs on a number of key points from other systems.

A major differentiator in terms of capabilities is the contamination control expertise that has developed over the years. “Honeywell UOP is very well known within the oil and gas and chemicals industries for creating processes that produce very high-quality products because of our contaminant control expertise,” Quast declared.

The process starts with a pre-treatment step in which the mixed waste feedstock is further sorted to eliminate metals and other non-plastic contaminants, which tend to affect the offtake quality.  

Another differentiator is the system — the core pyrolysis unit — itself. Honeywell UOP has developed a continuous process design that produces a high quality product and, incidentally, believed to be far fewer maintenance-related issues. The result is a light fraction and a heavier cut. The heavier stream can be sent to a fluidized catalytic cracker to make propylene.

“It's a continuous, straight-through process, so, not a batch operation, and it has features to keep it from having some of the technical issues that we believe some of our competitors might have,” he commented. “The process melts the waste plastics down to the molecular level, yielding a pyrolysis oil that is suitable as feedstock for new plastics.”

Honeywell UOP is currently conducting an LCA that is likely to show that the process is more efficient and less carbon-intensive than producing virgin plastics from fossil, he added.

Might that help to counter the criticism heard from opponents to the technology, who argue that pyrolysis is the same thing as incineration, just under a different name?

“There’s been a campaign aimed at discrediting the technology. In that context, the surprising thing to me is that some of the very vocal environmental groups that might have been anticipated to have been very positive towards the technology – it is aimed at removing waste plastic from the environment, after all - have actually been very negative about it. I think part of that has to do with a misunderstanding of what the use of pyrolysis for plastic circularity actually is.

It involves heating up waste plastics, in a controlled environment, turning it into liquid, which is then provided as a feedstock to petrochemical companies that use it to make new plastics resin out of, and displacing fossil feedstocks. However, the intent is not to incinerate the plastics, as that is actually what we are trying to get countries and municipalities not to do. We don’t want them to incinerate this waste for heating or power generation; what we are trying to do is to take the waste plastic that currently is going towards incineration and landfill and create new plastics from it,” Quast emphasized.

The differentiators in terms of technology and expertise produce an output product that Honeywell UOP calls recycled polymer feedstock, or RPF. 

“That oil can go to a petrochemical plant and it can be made into any plastic that they want to make – HDPE, LDPE, PS, whatever,” said Quast.

Honeywell is currently in a number of conversations globally about the suitability of RPF as a drop-in feed; in other words, a feedstock that is ready for use without having to go through a hydrotreatment process. The intent and expectation is that, with Honeywell’s expertise in contamination control, this will be possible, said Quast, although ‘there are a lot of different steam cracker variations globally’. “That's one of the things that the petrochemical companies we're partnering with really like: the fact that it's a high quality that fits the specs of their particular steam cracker.”

Honeywell UOP has samples of RPF produced at their pilot plant that after two years have retained their light color and clarity, with no settling or separation.

As yet, Honeywell does not have a full-scale plant in operation. The volumes of RPF being produced are therefore still relatively limited. Full-scale plants with a capacity of 30,000 metric tons per year each are in the final stages of approval to start construction.

“We have a standard modular 30,000 t/a unit size,” said Quast. “Part of the reason we standardized on 30k mt/a  is because early on, we did an analysis around waste plastic availability and size of city and so forth, and we identified that 30K MTA is about the ideal size for a mid-size city in terms of availability of plastic waste going through the recycling chain. At this point in time, it's very difficult to consistently maintain a continuous process plant of more than 30K mt/a.”

Although some competitors are talking about 200k mt, 120k mt, or 100k mt, securing feed of the right quality and volume on a consistent basis anywhere around the globe, is very difficult, he added, although it should become more feasible in the future.

Because of this, various customers and licensees will be initially installing a single 30K mt/a unit, which can be expanded with subsequent 30k mt/a units, as needed.

They're not going to have a big plant  - they're going to ease into it as the industry changes,” said Quast.

“The ironic thing is, there is more than enough plastic waste.  It's just that we need to do a better job at recovering it from the waste stream.”

In the brief period since Honeywell formally introduced its UpCycle Process Technology, it has announced some 5 collaborations with partners planning to deploy the technology. The first was the joint venture with Sacyr, a Spain-based global engineering and services company with operations in more than 20 countries worldwide, which was soon followed by licensing agreements with companies in the US, China, Korea, and Turkey.

In November 2022, a collaboration was announced with Egypt’s Environ Adapt for Recycling Industries, a leading company in waste management systems and resource recovery solutions, with the aim of advancing plastics recycling in that country. The companies signed a MoU to explore the development of the first advanced recycling facility in Egypt that would be equipped with Honeywell’s UpCycle Process Technology; already the first feasibility studies are in progress.

“I think this offers a great opportunity,” said Quast. He considers Northern Africa a region where, as the local economies expand, plastics usage is set to soar. And instead of waiting for this to become a major disposal problem, putting the infrastructure in place to process it could stop it from becoming one. The collaboration with Environ could also open the door to other countries in Africa for the technology, as Environ has many contacts there and understands those economies.

“Egypt is going to be a steppingstone to that continent but also to places like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia because of the relationship that they have there. Then there are opportunities potentially in Israel and Pakistan – in fact, we're having conversations everywhere around the world,” he said.

“Honeywell’s great: it opens doors. Advanced recycling is a nascent technology, but its potential to transform our ability to recycle plastics is already being acknowledged. With advanced recycling, instead trailing behind, and having to clean up after the fact, we actually have the opportunity to get ahead.”