Circular Plastic: Pure Logic

The power of innovation has risen to meet global challenges before. And it can again today.

Convert mixed waste into a feedstock for steam crackers and enable the production of a premium circular plastic product. This can help decarbonize your operations, fight waste, and future proof your business.

PureStep™ makes all this possible with chemical recycling via renewable naphtha.

You bring your challenges, we’ll bring our expertise

Pick a partner that knows how. TOPSOE™ has plenty of brainy folks working in this field, with many projects already well underway with clients.

With our commitment to perfecting chemistry for a better world, TOPSOE™ has a track record of helping clients to decarbonize and optimize their operations. Together, we can tackle the task at hand.

Full flexibility

Do it your way. Take advantage of economies of scale and build big or start off with a smaller operation. Construct a stand-alone plant or explore co-processing options. 

Whatever your approach, and whatever the feedstock, we are ready to deliver a proven technology so your business can be part of the solution to the world’s waste problems. That’s the power of Pure Innovation. 

The Process

The PureStep^TM process

The first thing you need in recycling is waste and unfortunately, with an abundance of landfills and waste being incinerated, sources are plentiful. But what happens next? Let’s take a look at the different types of recycling out there.

Mechanical recycling is what it sounds like: mechanical. Waste material passes through these stages: sorting, washing and drying, chopping, grinding, and reprocessing. This process is rather straightforward, but the material quality deteriorates in each cycle and the recycled material can rarely be used in the same application as before.

With chemical recycling, plastic waste is turned back into its chemical building blocks, monomers, or naphtha-like feedstock, enabling the production of new plastic.

But PureStep™ (Advanced chemical recycling) goes further and purer. It can remove impurities from low-grade mixed waste — something that wasn’t possible before. This is because of TOPSOE™’s deep knowledge of hydroprocessing technology and ability to take on hard to deal with feedstocks. And this means that waste such as tires, municipal solid waste and products containing PVC can now be recycled to premium circular plastic.

First, the waste is converted via a liquefaction process (pyrolysis or hydrothermal liquefaction) to an oil. That oil is then purified before it can be used as feedstock for new, circular plastic, that could be used even in food- and medical-grade plastics.

How it works?

With PureStep™, the recycling process takes place via these steps:

• Low-grade mixed waste is converted to a liquid via hydrothermal liquefaction or catalytic pyrolysis
  
  
• The liquid is upgraded to naphtha-like feedstock using TOPSOE™’s PureStep™ technology
  
  
• The feedstock can be fed into a steam cracker to produce top quality circular plastic products