Advanced Plastics Recycling Technologies and Market Screening for a Large International Bank

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.

Advanced recycling seeks to solve this issue and can be split into three categories: purification, decomposition, and conversion. The classifications have been developed based on how the process interacts with the polymer chemically –purification does not chemically change polymers in treatment, whereas decomposition and conversion break the polymers down to different degrees. Alternative advanced recycling processes target different waste streams and can produce a variety of products, ranging from as-virgin polymers to oil and natural gas replacement materials.

To respond to the strong demand for recycled plastics in the market, a large international bank was looking for attractive investments to support the scale up of advanced plastics recycling.

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 client 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