US renewable chemicals company Gevo (Englewood, Colorado; www.gevo.com) has opened a demonstration-scale paraxylene plant in Silsbee, Texas / USA. Gevo is working with the Coca-Cola Company (Atlanta, Georgia / USA; www.thecoca-colacompany.com) to develop production technology for renewable paraxylene for use in the production of fully renewable PET for beverage bottles. R&D support for the plant was provided by the Coca-Cola Company under a joint development agreement.

Gevo is also working with Toray Industries (Tokyo / Japan; www.toray.com) on the development of renewable paraxylene to be employed as a building block for fully renewable polyester for packaging films and fibres used in textiles, clothing and other applications. Funding assistance for the construction of the paraxylene plant was provided by Toray. Gevo and Toray have successfully produced fully renewable and recyclable PET fibres and films from isobutanol at laboratory scale in 2011. In 2012, Toray signed an offtake agreement for paraxylene produced at the Silsbee facility – see Plasteurope.com of 02.07.2012.

Gevo CEO, Patrick Gruber, said: “We believe we have an elegant, viable route to fully-renewable, non-petroleum derived PET and we are pleased that the Coca-Cola Company and Toray have supported this work.” The paraxylene facility is located adjacent to Gevo’s jet fuel plant.

Scott Vitters, a general manager at Coca-Cola, said: “While the technology to make bio-based materials in a lab has been available for many years, we believe Gevo possesses technologies that have high potential to create it on a global commercial level within the next few years. The opening of this facility is an important milestone toward our vision of creating all of our PET plastic packaging from responsibly-sourced plant materials.”