News Release

INEOS Styrolution participates at Ocean Plastics Lab in Berlin

10/20/18

Frankfurt, Germany


  • Ocean Plastics Lab to exhibit in Berlin on Oct 21-29, 2018
  • INEOS Styrolution contributes to the exhibition’s Co-Solution Center with latest information on the ResolVe project addressing chemical recycling of polystyrene

INEOS Styrolution, the global leader in styrenics, announced today that it will participate at the Ocean Plastics Lab in Berlin. The company will report on its efforts to analyse recycling technologies, establish a commercial and ecological evaluation of the recycling process and ultimately drive towards a circular economy for the materials it brings to the market to allow the realisation of leading solutions in industries such as automotive, healthcare, construction and many more.

INEOS Styrolution shows a continued commitment to establishing recycling processes for materials such as polystyrene. Together with a number of partners, the company currently leads numerous projects to explore different recycling technologies and various aspects of recycling with the goal to bring all findings together into a holistic recycling concept to be realised together with partners across the value chain including post-consumer waste collectors, sorters and recyclers.

Current projects include

- Collaboration with Agilyx Corporation

- Collaboration with Pyrowave

- Extended collaboration with Pyrowave and ReVital

- Collaboration on the ResolVe project with INEOS Köln, RWTH Aachen and Neue Materialien Bayreuth

The Ocean Plastics Lab is an initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the German Marine Research Consortium and the European Commission. Objective of the exhibition is to show the efforts to understand and solve the issue of marine litter.

INEOS Styrolution’s focus at the exhibition will be providing information on the ResolVe project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry BMBF as part of FONA (“Forschung für Nachhaltige Entwicklung”). The project, led by INEOS Styrolution and executed in cooperation with INEOS Köln, two institutes of the RWTH Aachen (I.A.R. and IKV) and Neue Materialien Bayreuth, is based on the idea of post-consumer waste being feed stock for new materials. It takes advantage of the amazing property of polystyrene to depolymerise to introduce a chemical recycling process closing the loop, linking waste collection and sorting with chemical production.

ResolVe is currently making significant progress due to the deployment of a new adjusted extruder. The latest focus is on purification of the styrene generated from the depolymerisation process, i.e. the separation of styrene from secondary products.

Dr. Norbert Niessner, Director Global R&D/ Intellectual Property, is thrilled by the outlook: “We at INEOS Styrolution consider post-consumer waste to be a valuable resource for recycling into new virgin, high-quality styrenic polymers, ultimately for food-related uses. We are clearly aiming at the move towards a circular economy for polystyrene.”