Italian engineering group Maire Tecnimont (Milan; www.mairetecnimont.com) is investing in a mechanical plastics recycling plant located in Bedizzole near Brescia / Italy. The group said the plant will be based on its “MyReplast” technology and, with a recycling efficiency of 95%, will produce 40,000 t/y of recycled polymers – making it among the largest in Europe. The investment is being made via Maire Tecnimont’s new NextChem subsidiary, which was launched in November 2018 to focus on new technologies for the energy transition market.

Through this transaction, NextChem will have a reference industrial scale plant that can be replicated for its customers. Mechanical recycling is, to date, the most widespread process to channel plastics waste towards reuse in the consumer sector, Maire Tecnimont said. The number of plants in Italy still does not match the urban and industrial waste recovery output, it added.

The Bedizzole plastics recycling plant will be managed by a new company, MyReplast Industries, which is a subsidiary of NextChem, and by local businessmen as minority shareholders. Maire Tecnimont said the plant can treat various types of plastics waste, both from industrial production (such as components of cars, food and industrial packaging waste) and from post-consumer waste, i.e. municipal differentiated waste. The recycled polymers will have the properties suitable for high value-added "premium" markets, thus bridging the qualitative gap between recycled and virgin plastics, it added.

One of the EU’s targets is to increase the percentage of recycled plastics in Europe from the current 5% to 17% by 2025. To achieve this increase of about 12m t in just six years, 175 new recycling and recovery plants will be needed, with a capacity of 50,000 t each, the group said. Market opportunities are greater near production and recovery centers of the material that acts as feedstock for the plant.

With the new mechanical recycling business, Maire Tecnimont is expanding beyond its traditional EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) approach to a new business model as a contractor, co-developer and plant operator. “The application of our technological and plant engineering capabilities to the new mechanical recycling business offers interesting opportunities in a sector that needs to industrialise the regeneration cycle of plastic materials,” commented Pierroberto Folgiero, CEO of Maire Tecnimont.