SK Global Chemical starts plastic waste recycling business in Asia

SK Global Chemical (SKGC), a petrochemical subsidiary of SK Innovation Co., plans to build a plastic waste recycling plant in South Korea to extract raw materials for chemical production from the waste as a start-up of the company in Asia, as the group strives to turn into an environmentally friendly company.

SKGC plans to invest 600 billion won ($522.6 million) in South Korea’s largest plastic waste recycling plant in Ulsan, which can process 184,000 tons per year, about 60% of the country’s total plastic waste, it said. company on July 8. be completed by 2025. SKGC aims to expand operations into Asia by establishing three more plants in the region, bringing total capacity to 400,000 tons per year by 2030.

The plant, also known as an eco-friendly city oil field, extracts raw materials such as naphtha, an important raw material for petrochemicals, from plastic waste instead of crude oil. SKGC operates a petrochemical complex, including a naphtha cracker in Ulsan, southeast of Seoul.

We will expand plastic waste recycling business outside of Korea to Asia through an idea of ​​a city oil field that extracts raw materials from plastic waste, said SKGC President & CEO Na Kyung-soo. We will complete environmental, social and governance (ESG) management by growing into a global company driving the vicious circle of plastic waste sources.”

FIRST CARBON TO GREEN PROJECT

The investment was the first project unveiled since SK Innovation announced a long-term carbon to green goal on July 1, with a plan to spend 30 trillion won on green projects by 2025.

SKGC will apply chemical recycling technologies, such as thermal decomposition and depolymerization, instead of a mechanical recycling method, which can hardly recycle contaminated plastics.

It will set up a pyrolysis plant with a processing capacity of 100,000 tons per year by 2024 with Brightmark LLC, a US producer of pyrolysis oil. In January, SKGC and Brightmark signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the commercialization of waste plastic pyrolysis and investment in the construction of a plastics renewal plant in South Korea.

SKGC will build a depolymerization unit that can process 84,000 tons per year by 2025 with Loop Industries, a Canada-based Nasdaq-listed company that owns patented depolymerization technology that recycles waste polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics and polyester fibers.

SKGC said on June 23 that it decided to buy a 10% stake in Loop. Both companies plan to form a joint venture with exclusivity next year to commercialize Loop’s sustainable production technology for PET plastic and polyester fiber in Asia.

At the time, SKGC said they plan to begin construction of a production facility that will be able to recycle 84,000 tons of waste PET annually by 2023 without specifying a location, then accelerate to produce a total of 400,000 tons of waste PET per year. process by building four production facilities. in Asia by 2030.

By Hyung-Kyu Kim and Kyung-Min Kango

[email protected]

Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.