Cyclyx International, ExxonMobil and LyondellBasell announced they have signed an agreement to advance development of a first-of-its-kind plastic waste sorting and processing facility in the Houston area. The new facility addresses a critical missing link in the plastic waste supply chain by connecting community recycling programs to new and more advanced recycling technologies that have the potential to take a much wider variety of plastic materials.
The Cyclyx Circularity Center will be unique among plastic recovery facilities, producing feedstock for both mechanical and advanced recycling. The center will leverage new technologies to analyze plastics based on their composition and sort them according to customer specifications for their highest and best reuse.
The circularity center will be located in the Greater Houston area, with commercial start-up expected in 2024. The facility will be designed to produce 150,000 metric tons or 330 million pounds of plastic feedstock per year, supplying ExxonMobil and LyondellBasell advanced recycling projects as well as mechanical recycling markets. Total investment for the first circularity center is estimated to be $100 million, contingent upon a final investment decision in early 2023.
“To help increase the overall U.S. recycling rate and meet growing customer demand for circular products, more investment is needed by governments and industry to collect and sort waste,” said Dave Andrew, vice president of new market development at ExxonMobil. “With this new facility, we are making a substantial investment in plastic waste sorting infrastructure to accelerate our advanced recycling efforts in Baytown and along the Gulf Coast.”
“We are growing our global recycling capacity and actively pursuing opportunities to help capture more plastic waste from landfills in order to make it suitable for recycling,” said Yvonne van der Laan, executive vice president of circular and low-carbon solutions at LyondellBasell. “This agreement is a perfect example of how collaboration across the value chain can help close the gaps to make a circular economy possible, such as access to plastic waste feedstock.”
“This project serves as proof of how significant the need is for custom blended plastics feedstock,” stated Joe Vaillancourt, CEO of Cyclyx. “With our capability to accept and process a wide range of waste plastics based on their chemistry profile which we custom blend to the needs of our customers, we are creating a new set of recycling options for difficult-to-recycle waste plastics that today are sent to landfill. Our circularity centers will allow us to make available a much larger amount of waste plastic into usable feedstock than has been possible with the current recycling infrastructure. Additional circularity centers are under consideration on the Gulf Coast and other locations.”