TotalEnergies Corbion enters partnership in hopes of advancing PLA recycling in South Korea

TotalEnergies Corbion, POSCO International and ESOL announced a partnership aimed at developing the PLA recycling infrastructure and technology in South Korea, said the company.

Hoping to expand its portfolio by entering the biobased plastic recycling sector, POSCO International will oversee and finance the project. The trading company has been working with bioplastics since 2019 and aspires to fully develop post-consumer recycling technology for PLA by 2026.

While TotalEnergies Corbion is set to contribute its own knowledge and experience of advanced PLA recycling, ESOL will source the PLA waste from post-consumer recycling and work towards advancing the necessary technology to collect, sort, clean, purify, and reuse the PLA. The latter is already producing PLA-based products in Korea and aims to establish recycling infrastructure throughout its supply chain for a more sustainable use of plastics in the country’s growing PLA market.

With the global bioplastic market said to be expanding at an annual growth rate of over 20%, the companies aspire to promote the use of PLA in various foodservice and packaging products, such as bottles and containers, through the mechanical and advanced recycling of TotalEnergies Corbion’s Luminy PLA. Recycling a material that is already biobased is expected to facilitate a low carbon footprint and increased circularity.

We remind, TotalEnergies and Paprec, leader in plastic recycling in France, have signed a long-term commercial agreement to develop a French value chain for advanced recycling of plastic film wastes. The agreement will secure the supply of TotalEnergies' future advanced plastic recycling plant in Grandpuits. Following the terms of this agreement, Citeo, the main organization in charge of end-of-life household packaging in France, will provide a stream of flexible plastic waste sorted from post-consumer packaging.

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Frederique van Baarle has taken up her position as a member of the Board of Management and Labor Director at Cologne-based specialty chemicals company LANXESS effective April 1, 2023, said the company.

Until the end of March van Baarle headed the High Performance Materials business unit at LANXESS, which was contributed to a joint venture for high-performance plastics with private equity firm Advent on April 1. The 51-year-old had already been appointed by the Supervisory Board in November 2022.

Van Baarle will also assume board responsibility for the Americas region from the second half of 2023. She will perform her new role from Pittsburgh, LANXESS’ U.S. headquarters.

We remind, India’s competition authority granted merger clearance for the planned joint venture for high-performance engineering materials by Advent International and specialty chemicals company LANXESS, said the company. Other relevant competition authorities approved the transaction in the course of last year and lately the EU Commission granted clearance on January 9, 2023. The transaction is therefore ready for closing which is now planned to take place no later than the beginning of April 2023.

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Linde has signed a long-term agreement with oil and gas firm ExxonMobil for the off-take of carbon dioxide (CO2) from its new clean hydrogen production site in Beaumont, Texas, said the company.

Back in February (2023), the industrial gas giant said it would invest $1.8bn to build, own and operate an on-site complex to supply clean hydrogen and nitrogen to OCI Global’s “world-scale” blue ammonia plant in Texas.
The facility will be integrated into Linde’s existing infrastructure along the US Gulf Coast and will also supply clean hydrogen to other new and existing off-takers across the network.

ExxonMobil has now agreed to annually transport and permanently store up to 2.2 million metric tonnes of CO2 from the production site: the equivalent to the emissions from nearly half a million cars per year. Dan Ammann, President of ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions, said the project is another significant step towards achieving heavy industry’s decarbonisation and Net Zero goals.

Dan Yankowski, Senior Vice-President Americas at Linde, adds, “Working with ExxonMobil as the CO2 off-taker at our Beaumont project supports Linde’s strategy to decarbonise customer processes while safely and reliably supplying low-carbon hydrogen at scale."

The significance of the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to the project is clear and acknowledged. The IRA was confirmed in August 2022 and includes a significant package of mostly supply-side measures supporting low-carbon energy sources and decarbonising technologies in the US.

We remind, Exxon Mobil Corp's Low Carbon business has the potential to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue and outperform the company's traditional oil and gas as soon as a decade from now, CEO Darren Woods said. The largest U.S. oil producer on Tuesday laid out to investors the aims of its emerging energy transition strategy in a meeting with Wall Street. Exxon is tackling what should be a multi-trillion market in 10 years or more, Woods said.

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Nouryon announced the expansion of its office footprint and workforce in Mumbai, India, with the launch of a new Global Service Center, said the company.

The Global Service Center includes commercial teams focused on business development in India as well as functional hubs that will support the Company’s global growth plans. The newly expanded office and innovation center in Mumbai will employ a growing workforce of nearly 350 employees that will occupy approximately 50,000 square feet.

“Our expanded presence in India reinforces Nouryon’s long-term commitment to this strategically important talent and growth market,” said Charlie Shaver, Nouryon Chairman and CEO. “Nouryon will continue to make sustained investments in talent development and capability enhancement to ensure Nouryon is well positioned to maximize growth in India and around the world."

The Global Service Center also hosts commercial teams, the innovation and application development center, as well as other supporting functional teams including Customer Service, Finance Operations, Logistics, Trade Compliance, Product Safety & Regulatory Affairs, Information Management, and Human Resources.

We remind, Nouryon announced that it has commissioned a chlorine dioxide plant to modernize and expand the Arauco pulp mill in Chile. The project, called the MAPA project, is a $2.35 billion pulp mill and is the largest industrial project in the Biobio region. The new plant adds 1.56 million tons per year of eucalyptus pulp capacity to Arauco’s footprint that will be supplied to its customers.

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Industry associations representing EU plastics producers, processors and users have called on the European Commission to develop transparent parameters for chemically recycled products, said Chemanager-online.

The traceability of recycled content is becoming a major concern for the industry as the number of products containing chemically recycled materials grows and there are no uniform standards for those making and selling them.

In an open letter to the EU government, 31 organizations and sub-groups along the plastics chain, spearheaded by the chemicals and plastics producers’ interest groups Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) and PlasticsEurope, are pressing the Commission to adopt harmonized rules for calculating the chemically recycled content of products, using the mass balance approach.

The process must be kicked off soon, say the industry associations, which also include processors’ organizations, such as European Plastics Converters (EUPC) its value chain partners.

To move forward more quickly, the industry groupings favor leveraging the EU’s Single Use Plastics Directive (SUPD) Implementing Act, which sets rules for calculating and verifying achievement of recycled content target.

Without prompt clarification, the interest groups say they fear falling farther behind on making investment decisions and being unable to stay ahead of legislative initiatives such as the proposed Packaging and Packaging Waste directive, which will set chemical recycling targets for 2030 and 2040.

We remind, Italian companies Saipem and Garbo have agreed to collaborate to commercialize the latter’s proprietary depolymerization technology, called ChemPET. The process converts waste PET into high-quality, high-value PET that can be reused in the chemical and food industries.

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