The two companies plan to build a sorting plant in Walldürn that will process up to 260,000 tonnes of mixed plastics per year for OMV's chemical recycling.

 

OMV, the Austrian oil, gas and chemicals group headquartered in Vienna, Austria, and Interzero, the Berlin-based environmental services provider, announced that OMV plans to invest 170 million euros in the joint venture and will in future hold 89.9 per cent of the sorting plant developed by Interzero to produce raw materials for chemical recycling. Interzero reportedly operates five sorting plants for light packaging (LVP) in Germany and, with more than 800,000 tonnes per year, sorts about a third of Germany's light packaging waste. The sorting plant planned in Walldürn, Austria, is said to be be the first of its kind on a large industrial scale to provide raw materials for the chemical recycling using OMV's ReOil® technology, thus returning previously non-recyclable plastics to the material cycle. According to the information provided, the feedstock for the sorting plant is essentially mixed plastics that have not been recyclable up to now, which come in particular from LVP collections from the yellow bag and the yellow bin in Germany. According to OMV and Interzero, production is scheduled to start in 2026. According to OMV, a new ReOil® plant with a capacity of 16,000 tonnes per year is currently being built at OMV's Schwechat site. The ReOil® technology, developed and patented by OMV, is a process that converts mechanically non-recyclable plastic waste into pyrolysis oil.
 
"The joint project with Interzero will provide feedstock for our ReOil® technology, which in turn will transform it into high-quality sustainable raw materials for plastics production. In this way, we are making a significant contribution to the creation of a circular economy for plastics," explains Dr Alfred Stern, CEO of OMV. Dr Axel Schweitzer, Chairman and shareholder of Interzero, is convinced that with the help of chemical recycling, the recycling rate in Germany can be further increased significantly in the future: "Our unique, fully automated sorting plant, which does not require manual sorting, is a significant step towards giving a second life to raw materials that previously went into incineration."
 
Sources:

• Pressrelease Interzero (Oct. 30, 2023)
• Pressrelease OMV (Oct. 31, 2023)
• Photo: © OMV