MOSCOW (MRC) -- Total has just completed an industrial scale test run, following a series of pilot plant trials, demonstrating the feasibility of sustainable incorporation of about 20% of post-consumer recycled polystyrene within virgin polystyrene (PS), as per the company's press release.
The trial, which was carried out on an existing production asset, successfully led to product with properties equivalent to virgin polymer.
"Polystyrene is one of the easiest polymers to recycle," explains Jean Viallefont, Vice President Polymer Europe. "Our success highlights that polystyrene, which naturally provides outstanding performance for various applications, will be a significant contributor to the Circular Economy. It is unquestionably an innovative way to enlarge the accessible market for recycled PS and to convert a large volume of post-consumer waste."
Based on this encouraging result, Total is launching new developments to manage contamination of recycled streams. The objective is to create a robust process in order to handle complex polystyrene waste streams that can be implemented on our different existing production lines.
As MRC wrote before, in 2015, Total said in a permit application to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) that its proposed new ethane cracker near the company's refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, was being designed to have a capacity of 1 million tpy.
Total S.A. is a French multinational oil and gas company and one of the six "Supermajor" oil companies in the world with business in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Asia. The company's petrochemical products cover two main groups: base chemicals and the consumer polymers (polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene) that are derived from them.
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