Evaluating Plastics Recycling Technologies for an International Bank

Situation

With an increasing demand for plastics recycling and recycled polymers, advanced recycling technologies are rapidly developing to provide potential options to recycle mixed, coloured, and flexible plastics waste. Whilst an emerging market, a multitude of new technologies and suppliers have recently entered mainstream financing. Advanced recycling involves a multitude of different processes which aim to turn plastics waste back into virgin-like recycled commodities.

Mechanical recycling is the currently established method for plastics recycling, typically employing the process of sort, shred, wash, extrude to produce recycled flakes, granules, or pellets. But using the mechanical recycling method, many plastic waste streams remain hard to recover and recycle for a variety of reasons, including mixed and variable compositions, low collection volumes, and costly collection, separation, sorting, and processing.

Solution

Anthesis carried out an advanced plastics supplier screening to help the bank to evaluate the investment opportunities in this growing sector and to support the bank to develop an investment strategy.

The deliverables for this project included:

• Development of a joint knowledge base with a set of technology fact sheets for the suite of plastics recycling technologies available in the global market.
• Identification of potentially attractive plastics recycling investment opportunities using a set of priority criteria, developed in partnership with the client.
• Formation of key profiles for ten potentially attractive plastics recycling suppliers and technologies for the client to take forward in separate discussions.
• A review of the commercial risks and challenges for the technology categories.
• An overview of plastics recycling in different geographies across North and South America, South East Asia and Europe, considering the regulatory landscapes, current collection and plastics recycling supply chains and related infrastructure for plastics recyclates.

Anthesis provided the bank with a concise report and recommendations to be taken forward into their investment strategy and business development activities.

Impact

This knowledge allowed the bank to develop a robust investment strategy and connect with potentially interesting companies to evaluate the attractiveness of related investments.