VTT licenses its revolutionary mixed plastic recycling technology, Olefy, to US-based Refinity. The company develops and commercialises new waste recovery technologies.
VTT has sold a global license of its chemical recycling technology for mixed plastic waste to Refinity, a new subsidiary of Innventure Inc. (NASDAQ: IHV). Refinity intends to use the technology to commercialise a process to profitably recycle even poor-quality plastic waste into plastics that are of the same quality to new products. These materials are suitable for use in the food and pharmaceutical industries, for example.
Today, most plastic waste in Europe ends up being recycled for energy. VTT’s innovative technology directly converts unsorted mixed plastic waste into raw materials for the petrochemical industry, including ethylene and propene. The process improves the opportunities to use plastic waste that isn’t suited for mechanical recycling and is currently sent to landfills or burned to generate energy.
Refinity intends to scale up the technology and deploy it in new commercial plastic waste recycling facilities. The Dow Chemical Company provides technical resources to support the process design and implementation and works with Refinity to find locations for future commercial production.
“This is an important next step in the global development and implementation of the new waste conversion process,” says Bill Haskell, CEO of Innventure. “I’m excited about Refinity’s ongoing partnership with VTT and Dow.”
“This technology is an important solution for recycling plastic waste over and over into products of the same quality as the original. The technology is based on VTT’s decades-long research and development work in thermochemical conversion. It is significant that this technology now finds global use through this technology transfer,” says Tua Huomo, Executive Vice President at VTT.
Olefy technology has been demonstrated at pilot scale at the VTT Bioruukki pilot centre in Espoo, Finland.
“VTT and Refinity will continue to optimize the technology for various raw material streams unsuitable for mechanical recycling and support the upscaling of the process to industrial production. It will be great to see our researchers’ work proceed to commercial use in the next few years,” says Jarmo Ropponen, Vice President of Industrial Chemistry at VTT.
Innventure
Innventure (NASDAQ: INV) establishes, finances and carries out business activities focusing on transformative sustainable development technology solutions that it purchases or licenses from multinational actors. As an owner, Innventure makes use of ground-breaking technologies from early evaluation to commercial scale with an approach designed to mitigate risks when it creates revolutionary companies that it believes will achieve an enterprise value of $1 billion. Innventure defines ‘revolutionary’ innovations as those that can significantly change the way businesses, industries, markets and/or consumers operate.
