Finland – Neste has made the final investment decision to start building upgrading facilities for liquefied plastic waste at its Porvoo refinery in Finland.
Neste will construct the capability to upgrade 150,000 tons of liquid waste plastic annually with the investment of 111 million euros. The three processing phases of pretreatment, upgrading, and refining convert liquid waste plastic into high-quality feedstock for new plastics. The investment is a component of a larger project (PULSE), which will have a total capacity of 400,000 tons per year when fully implemented and has been awarded a 135 million euro grant from the EU Innovation Fund.
In Neste’s strategy for chemical recycling, upgrading and pretreatment of liquefied waste plastic play a significant part. They enable the company to treat plastic trash of lower quality with greater flexibility and to boost the rate at which the liquefied waste plastic is converted into high-quality petrochemical feedstock at its Porvoo refinery.
Scaling up chemical recycling
In order to scale up chemical recycling quickly and effectively, the project will see Neste construct new assets at the Porvoo refinery while also utilizing existing assets through retrofitting. The enhanced waste plastic will subsequently be processed in the standard refinery, taking some of the place of the fossil fuels used in the Porvoo refinery’s processing.
The Porvoo refinery’s necessary preparation work was finished in the first half of 2023, which allowed building to start right away.
