South Korean authorities probe origins of naphtha imports

South Korean authorities are investigating imports of naphtha, a petrochemical feedstock, looking into whether supply from Russia was being mislabeled as fuel from elsewhere, multiple sources familiar with the matter said, as per Hydrocarbonprocessing.

It could not immediately be determined why authorities were probing the origin of the naphtha, although Russian-origin energy cargoes have come under closer scrutiny in the aftermath of the sanctions on Moscow. The authorities have sought information from South Korean petrochemical firms as well as Trafigura, a global commodities trader which is among several companies selling naphtha into the country, sources said, declining to be named as they are not authorized to speak to the media.

The sources said they had no further details, including which Korean petrochemical firms had been contacted. Trafigura declined to comment. The Korea Customs Service declined to comment. A National Police Agency official said he had no immediate comment.

One of the sources said authorities including police and customs officials were looking into naphtha labelled as imported from Tunisia. Naphtha imports from Tunisia started in late 2022, with about 10,000 barrels per day (bpd) imported in 2023, Kpler data showed. The probe was first reported by Bloomberg.

South Korea was Asia's top naphtha importer at 560,000 bpd last year, Kpler data showed. The Group of Seven (G7) countries, the European Union and Australia set price caps for Russian crude and oil products to allow access to western services and keep markets supplied while limiting Moscow's revenues in the aftermath of its invasion of Ukraine. The EU banned import of those fuels from Feb. 5, 2023. South Korea supports the G7 price cap.

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Novoloop, an advanced recycling startup based in Menlo Park, California, announced that it has raised USD11 mln in Series A funding, said Recyclingtoday.

The funding will be used to expand the company's plastic chemical recycling process, Accelerated Thermal Oxidative Decomposition (ATOD), and bring its production process to scale. Miranda Wang, co-founder and CEO of Novoloop, said: “Plastic is not going away anytime soon, so we need innovation to close the gap between what is produced and what is reused. Our technical processing capacity has expanded to tens of thousands of tons.”

The round was led by Envisioning Partners, with participation from Valo Ventures and Bemis Associates. Early investors in the round include SOSV, Mistletoe and TIME Ventures.

ATOD is a proprietary processing technology that breaks down polyethylene (PE) into chemical components that can be synthesized into high-value products, the company said. The process will be used to make Oistre, a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) used in high-performance applications such as footwear, apparel, sporting goods, automotive and electronics.

Oistre is the first thermoplastic polyurethane made from post-consumer polyethylene with performance characteristics that match virgin thermoplastic polyurethanes made from petrochemicals, the company said. At the same time, Oistre's carbon footprint is 46 percent smaller than conventional TPU.

Development work with Bemis will begin in March. The product will first be used on its Sewfree on Demand line by Shirley, Massachusetts-based brand consultant Bemis Associates as a possible replacement for virgin petroleum-based thermoplastic polyurethane, Wang said.

In a press release, Bemis said: “Since its founding in 2015, Novoloop has been a pioneer in chemically converting plastic waste into high-performance chemicals and materials. Through strategic investments in environmentally conscious technologies, Bemis will continue to strengthen Its leadership in sustainability and offering a wide range of environmentally friendly products to the market."

Novoloop was founded when Wang and her business partner, Jeanny Yao, were undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Toronto. Before that, the duo came up with the idea to start the project after visiting a municipal waste transfer station and realizing how much material was not being recycled.

While Oistre will be one of the company's main products, Wang estimates ATOD derivatives can produce a variety of products, including various adhesives, paints and nylons. The overall market for the products Novoloop can make is more than $140 billion, Wang said.

Novoloop is working to develop relationships with material recovery agencies like GreenWaste Recovery in San Jose, Calif., to source materials used to make Oistre, she said. Novoloop and GreenWaste Recovery plan to launch a new project later this year.

Novoloop says it is currently sampling and accepting pre-orders for Oistre 65A, a soft-grade polyester thermoplastic polyurethane for injection molding, especially for footwear applications. Higher hardness grades of Oistre TPU will be available soon.

We remind, INEOS Olefins & Polymers Europe, PepsiCo and Amcor have teamed up to launch new snack packaging for Sunbites crisps containing 50% recycled plastic, said the company. The new packaging was launched in the UK and Ireland for PepsiCo’s snack brand Sunbites in late 2023. The packaging is made by recycling plastic waste into food grade packaging material using an advanced recycling process.

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A fire at Exxon Mobil's Port Jerome-Gravenchon refinery in northern France, which broke out earlier, has been brought under control, said Reuters.

The Seine-Maritime prefecture said in a statement that the fire had started at a gasoline distillation unit around 3:30 p.m. (1430 GMT) and had generated thick plumes of smoke. It added that it had not been necessary to send external fire brigade services to the site, as the company's own firefighters had brought the blaze under control.

The refinery, located in Normandy on the banks of the Seine river, has two distillery towers and a capacity of 240,000 barrels per day (bpd), making it amongst the biggest in France. It supplies the Ile-de-France region around Paris.

An ExxonMobil spokeswoman said three people had been treated by medical teams on site and two had been sent to a local hospital. She added that it was too early to estimate the fire's impact on the refinery's production.

Air quality in the local area had not been affected, the company said. The prefecture said air samples have been taken.

We remind, QatarEnergy and ExxonMobil are on track to commence LNG production at their Golden Pass LNG export terminal, situated on the US Gulf Coast near Sabine Pass, Texas, during the first half of 2025. QatarEnergy, a state-owned entity, holds a substantial 70 percent stake in the Golden Pass project, which boasts a capacity exceeding 18 million metric tons per annum (mtpa). Notably, QatarEnergy will offload 70 percent of the terminal's capacity. In parallel, ExxonMobil, a prominent US-based energy firm, possesses a 30 percent share in the venture.

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Three U.S. factories operated by the Livingston, New Jersey-based Inteplast Group have received ISCC (International Sustainability & Carbon Certification) Plus certification, said Recyclingtoday.

The Inteplast BOPP Films business unit can now offer ISCC-certified recycled-content plastic film materials made at its facilities in Gray Court, South Carolina; Lolita, Texas; and Morristown, Tennessee. Lines at those plants can now produce and supply ISCC-certified materials that are attributed via a mass balance approach, the company says, making Inteplast “one of the first North American biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP) film manufacturers to hold the ISCC PLUS designation.”

Paul Marquard, general manager and vice president of BOPP Films, says the certification and its mass balance approach “fortifies” circular economic development in the 21st century, helping turn plastic scrap into “a restorative resource.”

“Inteplast BOPP Films is committed to embracing the principles of a circular economy, which will shape our operational procedures and product innovation," Marquard says. "With our ISCC Plus certification, we are equipped to provide cutting-edge recycling solutions that align with the objectives of packaging converters and consumer product companies.

“Ultimately, our certified materials contribute to a significant reduction in the utilization of fossil-based virgin plastics within packaging.”

Rafael Bayona, Inteplast director of research and development, quality assurance, and technology, says the firm’s customers are demonstrating an increasing demand for recycled-content materials.

“The flexible packaging industry is demanding end-of-life solutions,” he says. “The development of advanced recycling technology has been established in North America and will continue to expand in scale. The ISCC PLUS certification at our U.S. facilities and our plan to expand the certification to our remaining Canadian plant allows us to provide films linked to varying levels of certified material across our full portfolio of films.”

Bayona says every department in the BOPP Films U.S. plants has been trained to implement ISCC Plus certification standards in areas of sales, production, marketing and procurement. The remaining BOPP Films plant in Lanoraie, Quebec, Canada, is expected to be certified by this June.

Inteplast Group began its recycling-related sustainability efforts more than three decades ago at its site in Texas. “The development of recyclable and reusable packaging lines, postconsumer resin blends in grocery and retail items, and other innovation that aligns with the tenets of lean manufacturing is prioritized throughout BOPP Films,” the firm says.

Established in 1991, Inteplast Group now has more than 8,000 employees helping manufacture plastics for the health care, food service, packaging, building products, grocery, retail, sanitation, industrial, and graphic arts industries.

We remind, INEOS Olefins & Polymers Europe, PepsiCo and Amcor have teamed up to launch new snack packaging for Sunbites crisps containing 50% recycled plastic. The new packaging was launched in the UK and Ireland for PepsiCo’s snack brand Sunbites in late 2023. The packaging is made by recycling plastic waste into food grade packaging material using an advanced recycling process, which the companies describe as a complementary approach to mechanical recycling.

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INEOS Olefins & Polymers Europe, PepsiCo and Amcor have teamed up to launch new snack packaging for Sunbites crisps containing 50% recycled plastic, said the company.

The new packaging was launched in the UK and Ireland for PepsiCo’s snack brand Sunbites in late 2023. The packaging is made by recycling plastic waste into food grade packaging material using an advanced recycling process, which the companies describe as a complementary approach to mechanical recycling, which enables the recycled materials to satisfy the demanding EU regulatory requirements for applications such as food contact packaging, contact sensitive and medical devices.

The collaboration included multiple partners from across the supply chain. GreenDot ensured the procurement and supply of post-consumer plastic packaging waste, which was converted into TACOIL (pyrolysis oil) using Plastic Energy’s technology, and INEOS used this pyrolysis oil as an alternative to traditional fossil feedstock to produce recycled propylene, before turning it into virgin-quality recycled polypropylene resin at its plant in Lavera, France.

IRPLAST reportedly uses the new resin to turn existing plastic packaging designs into new packaging films containing 50% of post-consumer recycled materials and meeting the food contact performance requirements. Amcor transformed these films into printed packaging that delivers the same technical performance for PepsiCo.

Using these new polypropylene films, PepsiCo launched the Sunbites packaging in the UK. The partnership is part of PepsiCo Positive (pep+), the company’s end-to-end transformation, which aims to eliminate virgin fossil-based plastic in crisp and chip bags in Europe by 2030.

The recycled polymer content is certified under the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC PLUS) scheme, an independent third party who certify it has been tracked through the production process using mass balance principles and the claim being made is accurate.

The upcoming EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) is expected to set out ambitious targets for recycling packaging waste for 2025 and 2030 across a range of materials and recycled content targets for plastics. INEOS says the achievement demonstrates that advanced recycling technologies can play a critical role in meeting the growing demand for the safe, circular use of recycled materials in food contact products, helping the EU to achieve its 10% recycled content objective for contact sensitive plastic packaging by 2030.

In the last year, developments in recycled content included Solvay and Hegen’s partnership to bring ‘the first baby bottle made with recycled content’ to the market, made from non-fossil feedstock content and apparently third-party mass balance certified and free of artificial pigments, phthalates and bisphenols, such as BPA.

It also saw air up launch a new line of reusable bottles made from Eastman?Tritan Renew, reportedly consisting of 50%?ISCC-certified recycled content sourced from a molecular recycling technology, thought to utilize up to 88% less plastic than single-use bottles.

We remind, in March, Ineos Styrolution, a subsidiary of the prominent European petrochemical producer Ineos, has made a notable decision to increase the prices of its Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) products in the United States. The impetus behind this price adjustment stems from the escalating costs associated with the production and delivery of materials, a circumstance communicated to customers through an official letter from the manufacturer.

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