HOUSTON (ICIS)–Agilyx and ExxonMobil have
created a joint venture that will recover and
sort waste plastic, the chemical recycling
company said on Friday.
The joint venture, called Cyclyx International,
will develop ways to aggregate and process
waste plastics, preparing them for recycling.
Under an agreement signed by the two companies,
ExxonMobil will invest $8m for a 25% stake in
Cyclyx, Agilyx said.
In return, ExxonMobil will get priortised
access to plastic waste for recycling projects
that it is developing, Agilyx said. ExxonMobil
will also get access to Agilyx’s artificial
intelligence platform. The two companies will
work together to develop more technologies and
techniques.
Agilyx said it will benefit from a royalty on
all the feedstock flowing through Cyclyx.
Agilyx had
created Cyclyx earlier to connect waste
companies with chemical and mechanical
recyclers. ExxonMobil is a founding member of
the joint venture.
Cyclyx wants to attract other companies, which
could include retailers, brand owners,
waste-management companies, petrochemical
producers and municipalities.
By 2025, Cyclyx plans to develop systems that
can collect and sort 300,000 tons/year, Agilyx
said. The company did not specify if the figure
is in short tons or metric tonnes.
By 2030, Cyclyx wants to process 3m tons/year
of waste plastic around the world, it said.
ExxonMobil said, “The agreement will enable the
development of innovative solutions for
aggregating and pre-processing large volumes of
plastic waste to be used as raw material in
recycling processes.”
Collecting, sorting and pre-processing plastic
waste has been one of the main challenges of
recycling the material, whether chemically or
mechanically.
Under mechanical recycling, waste plastic is
cleaned, sorted and remelted. Sorting is
critical, since different types of plastic can
contaminate the recycled resins and compromise
its performance.
Chemical recycling breaks down the chemical
bonds in the plastic, producing feedstock that
can be re-polymerised to form new plastics with
properties nearly indistinguishable from virgin
material.
Chemical recycling can handle mixed plastics
and material that is too dirty or degraded for
mechanical recycling. However, chemical
recycling requires chemical plants.
Chemical recycling also needs some degree of
sorting, since the chlorine in polyvinyl
chloride (PVC) can react during chemical
processes to produce harmful byproducts.
Agilyx has a plant in
Tigard, Oregon state in the US, which relies on
pyrolysis to convert waste polystyrene (PS)
into styrene oil.
It
recently listed its shares on the Merkur
Market of the Oslo Bourse in Norway.
