Gas and oil multinational Eni (Rome / Italy; www.eni.com) has signed an agreement with Corepla (Milan / Italy; www.corepla.it), the Italian consortium for the collection, recycling and recovery of plastic packaging, to launch a series of research projects to manufacture hydrogen and high-quality biofuels from non-recyclable plastic packaging waste. The agreement defines a joint working group that over the next six months will look into launching the research projects.

The working group will analyse how the market of non-mechanically recyclable packaging will evolve in the next few years and the types of waste that can be used to process and maximise recovery in line with new EU directives. The agreement ultimately seeks to transform some of those plastics which cannot currently be recycled in normal sorted waste processes. The two companies say that almost all "plasmix" – packaging plastics which have no use in the market of recycling – goes towards energy recovery, apart from a small fraction that ends up in landfill.

Eni has been producing high-quality biofuels from used cooking oil, animal fat and other non-edible waste, in Porto Marghera near Venice / Italy since 2014. Hydrogen is an important part of the process since it neutralises the oxygen in vegetable oil and converts the triglycerides into paraffins and isoparaffins, removing the sulphur, nitrogen and polyaromatic hydrocarbons from the biofuel.