Less waste, more future: Sort, recycle, repeat

A dynamic and visually striking image of recyclable materials captured in a blurred, spinning motion.

Oct 25, 2024

4 min read

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CO2 & Climate
Anna Platzer

Anna Platzer

Exciting new business models tend to arise in pursuit of a circular economy. For our transformation to succeed, we need reliable partners by our side: We have teamed up with a leading waste management and sorting company to build an innovative sorting plant for end-of-life plastics.

If the media is anything to go by, our world appears to be drowning in mountains of waste. Not only is this a burden for people and the environment, it also means that many valuable raw materials are lost – plastic for example. After all, even if not obvious at first glance, plastic film, fruit packaging, yogurt pots – these are all potentially valuable feedstock for producing recyclate and thus enable us to reduce the usage of fossil resources. As long as the technology works, that is. All over the world people are working hard to build plants that recycle mixed plastics in an ecologically and economically efficient way, thereby helping to establish a circular economy for plastics.

ReOil® is our proprietary chemical recycling technology. We have gathered more than 15 years of operational experience, thanks to insightful testing and piloting. Our pilot plant has been up and running at the Schwechat refinery since 2018, accumulating over 29,000 hours in operation. Our new ReOil demo plant will start up in the second half of 2024 and increase our yearly capacity to 16,000 metric tons of end-of-life plastic. Serving as an ideal complement to well-established mechanical recycling processes, the ReOil process converts end-of-life plastics into circular feedstock for the production of sustainable chemicals, in particular plastic. The focus now is on procuring the right “feed” for this and subsequent plants. And that turns out to be far from easy, despite the supposed mountains of waste.

“Not all waste is created equal.”

Anna Platzer
responsible for the procurement of raw materials for OMV's ReOil plants

End-of-life plastic as a raw material


After all, not all waste is created equal. Before waste can be turned back into valuable raw materials for recycling, it has to be collected and sorted. Depending on the source of the waste and the type of collection, a rough distinction is made between three waste streams that contain end-of-life plastics: Separately collected waste (LWP i.e. lightweighted packaging) from the recycling bin, residual household waste, and commercial and industrial waste.

When it comes to our chemical recycling technology, only certain types of plastics contained in these streams are relevant: “It is primarily polyolefins that we need as feedstock for the ReOil plant – and only fractions that are not already mechanically recyclable and currently go into landfill or incineration are relevant. It is precisely this waste that we need to source on a large scale so that our plants can run reliably in the future and ultimately provide the considerable amount of recycled chemicals to help our customers meet their recycled content targets”, explains Anna Platzer, who is responsible for procuring raw materials for the ReOil plants at OMV.

From sorting plant to feedstock


The ultimate goal is to use mixed plastic waste – which is mainly sent for incineration at present – to produce enough recycled material for the sustainable production of goods and packaging. This can only happen with reliable partners. Waste management companies like the Interzero, the European leader in sorting lightweight packaging waste, are one such partner. “Interzero sorts around 30% of lightweight packaging waste in Germany, which makes the company an ideal partner for us”, says Anna Platzer.

In an innovative sorting plant in southern Germany, OMV and Interzero will transform the mixed plastics left over after sorting of lightweight packaging waste into chemical recycling feedstock thereby ensuring sufficient supplies for OMV’s ReOil plants. “With an annual input capacity of 260,000 metric tons, the new sorting plant will be the first of its kind to produce feedstock for OMV’s chemical recycling on a large scale”, says Anna Platzer. “The cooperation with Interzero gives us access to a third of the lightweight packaging waste in Europe’s largest market”.

Sensibly recycling even more plastic


However, there can also be end-of-life plastic suitable for chemical recycling hiding in the residual waste. “We believe that in future, post-consumer plastics could be sorted out of residual waste and processed so that they serve as a source of raw materials for our ReOil plants”, says Anna Platzer.

Which brings us back full circle: Not all waste is created equal – and there is a great deal of pioneering spirit and partnership in recycling.