Ineos Styrolution (Frankfurt / Germany; www.ineosstyrolution.com) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with environmental technology and development company Agilyx (Tigard, Oregon / USA; www.agilyx.com) to use the Oregon company’s depolymerisation technology at or near one of the Ineos subsidiary’s North American production facilities. The plan is to chemically convert post-consumer polystyrene waste back into styrene monomer and manufacture new PS products from it. The ultimate goal, the companies said, is to establish a chemical recycling infrastructure and build a circular economy for polystyrene.

Last month, Agilyx opened its first commercial waste polystyrene-to-styrene oil chemical recycling plant at Tigard – see Plasteurope.com of 15.08.2017. In addition to the company’s strategic partners and local government representatives, speakers at the ribbon-cutting ceremony on 24 April also included officials of the American Chemistry Council (ACC, Washington, D.C.; www.americanchemistry.org ) and Americas Styrenics (AmSty, The Woodlands, Texas / USA). AmSty is joint venture of ChevronPhillips and Trinseo bundling the US PS lines of Chevron and Dow.

The Tigard plant, claimed to be the first to use a commercial-scale closed-loop chemical recycling process for polystyrene, will have a throughput capacity of up to 20 t/d of previously unrecoverable PS from mixed-waste streams. Both Ineos Styrolution and Americas Styrenics will use what Agilyx said will be the “high-quality styrene oil” that emerges from the process. Agilyx has also commercialised a technology to convert mixed plastics to high-quality vacuum gas oil (VGO) crude. The company is also working with waste service providers and a number of other partners to develop closed-loop recycling solutions for other plastics.