Japanese PET chemical recycler to go public in US

Jeplan Inc., a PET chemical recycler based in Kawasaki, Japan, will soon go public in the United States through a merger with AP Acquisition Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

An SPAC allows a company to go public without going through the initial public offering process.

The deal was first announced in September, when the companies said they had filed a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The merger is expected to close in the "coming weeks," BNN Bloomberg has reported. It will see Jeplan listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), increasing its value at around $300 million and the merged entity at an estimated $429 million, according to BNN Bloomberg.

Jeplan did not list specific expansion plans related to the SPAC listing.

Listing on the NYSE will allow Jeplan to access capital from a wider base of investors, boost its brand, and attract additional talent needed to drive further growth, the company reportedly told BNN Bloomberg.

Jeplan opened in 2007 and its business first focused on cotton fiber recycling. In 2018, it acquired PET Refine Technology, a PET bottle depolymerization technology business and one of the first PET chemical recycling facilities in the world operating on a commercial scale.

The same year, Jeplan started a demonstration plant capable of handling 2,000 metric tons per year called Kitakyushu Hibikinada Plant (KHP) in Japan for textile-to-textile recycling. The KHP process uses polyester textile feedstock collected by their own textile collection, sorting and separation program called BRING.

In 2020, Jeplan, the French Institute of Petroleum, and Axens signed a joint development and commercialization agreement in order to develop, demonstrate, and commercialize a glycolysis-based PET monomer recycling process called Rewind PET for all types of waste PET-based materials, including bottles, films, trays and textile. The partners started the demonstration process in October 2023 at Jeplan’s existing KHP.