Germany’s packaging manufacturer Südpack (Ochsenhausen; www.suedpack.com) and Clean Cycle Investments have signed an agreement to invest in compatriot Carboliq, the chemical recycling unit of Recenso (Remscheid; www.recenso.eu). Südpack, Clean Cycle, and Carboliq plan to pool their expertise in material management with chemical recycling. Their aim is to further expand processing of a wide range of plastics for chemical recycling and to make non-reusable packaging materials suitable for reclaim.

Related: Dow collaborates with Südpack on biopharmaceutical packaging

Südpack initially participated in Recenso’s chemical recycling project that started last year (see Plasteurope.com of 08.10.2020). A domestic pilot plant in Ennigerloh is said to have shown that the recovered virgin-grade oil can be used by the plastics industry to produce a range of plastic granulates, which in turn can be processed into high-performance films for packaging applications, particularly for the food industry.

The Carboliq plants use catalytic tribochemical conversion (CTC) and are unique in the world, Südpack said.

Clean Cycle Investments has been founded by the family Last, an entrepreneurial family active in the fields of flexible packaging and the sole owner of US-based Scholle IPN (Northlake, Illinois; www.scholleipn.com). Scholle IPN is to be taken over by Swiss composite carton specialist SIG Combibloc (Neuhausen; www.sig.biz) for more than EUR 1 bn this year (see Plasteurope.com of 07.02.2022).

The family Last has decided to invest an initial EUR 100-150 mn into highly technological companies active in the recycling industry. In that respect Cycle closed its first acquisition in 2021 by acquiring an investment in Obbotec, a Netherlands-based technology provider specialised in the chemical recycling of residual plastic waste (see Plasteurope.com of 27.07.2021).