Fra vanskelig plast til nye produkter

– We use pyrolysis as the chemical process to convert challenging mixed plastic waste into new products, explains Sustainability Director at Norner, Thor Kamfjord.

He stands in front of what he calls a "pioneering" pilot plant for chemical plastic recycling, located in Norner’s facilities in Porsgrunn. A typical example of "difficult plastic" that the plant should be able to receive is labels from PET-plastic drink bottles, which currently end up being incinerated.

It is an important step towards meeting the EU requirements for 2030, which stipulate that all types of single-use plastic bottles must contain a minimum of 30 percent material recycled plastic.

Giving Plastic New Life

– What we get is pyrolysis oil, Kamfjord explains, showing a small bottle with a golden, transparent liquid. He continues:

– Our goal is to return this to new plastic raw material production. Then we get a material that consists of recycled plastic and can be used, among other things, for medical applications and in food packaging.

Minister of Energy Terje Aasland has personally received a tour of the pilot plant. He believes the project is fully in line with the set climate and environmental goals.

– We have to handle the plastic and its related environmental issues and integrate it into a circular process. Therefore, this is an incredibly exciting project.

Important for the Future

The CEO of the Norwegian Retailers' Environment Fund, Cecilie Lind, states that an important reason they chose to invest in the project is that chemical recycling will be essential for the Norwegian plastics system to become climate neutral. This is revealed in a large series of reports funded by the fund.

– In addition, there are very interesting participants who have come together in this project. It is a significant knowledge environment, both in plastics and in process industry. The combination of the two makes us very curious about what they can achieve with this pilot project, which is now very well underway, says Lind.

She hopes that the project will prove that chemical recycling is capable of handling some of the materials that are difficult to recycle mechanically.

– It will be a valuable contribution so that we can reuse larger parts of the plastics again and again in the future, so we do not have to extract oil to access new plastic materials - which we will need in the future as well, she concludes.

Unique Technology

– This technology is unique because we carry out a pretreatment that ensures any problems that would end up inside the pyrolysis reactor are handled beforehand. Another unique aspect is that the residence time in the reactor is only seconds and not half an hour, as in other facilities.

Kamfjord explains that this is significant because it is essential to be able to run the necessary processes with the lowest possible energy consumption. A third unique aspect of the project, Kamfjord tells, is that the oil they obtain is very pure.

– It has been tested by large international actors who are accustomed to handling the conventional raw material source for plastics. Now our goal is to be able to tell them: «What you get from plastic waste is as good as what you get from fossil raw material sources», he concludes.