Recycling technology difficult to save styrene market

Recently, Bill Cooper, senior vice president of strategy and development at chemical recycling company Agilyx, said that if it can reach the appropriate scale, the recycling cost of chemical recycling route may be better than that of corresponding petroleum-based products, which can lead the development of recycled polymers in the futu.

PS can be recycled

PS has long been considered a difficult-to-recycle plastic produ.

Bill Cooper of Agilyx said: “Agilyx is relatively mature in polymer recycling technology, and the flexibility of raw materials has been solv.

However, Cooper acknowledged that while Agilyx was able to process contaminated PS waste, the partially recycled styrene and PS contained significant amounts of other chemicals and polyme.

According to Agilyx, the PS recovery unit that has been built and operated in the United States adopts pyrolysis technolo.

Agilyx said the company is continuously expanding its recycling capacity for plasti.

Saving the market is a big task

Cooper said changing people's perceptions of PS is an uphill battle, and Agilyx has been trying to change people's perceptions of PS to ensure legislation doesn't ban the use of a recyclable materi.

However, with Agilyx's current processing capacity, if the average yield of styrene oil is near the high value of 70%, the plant's recoverable styrene capacity is still less than 13,000 tons/ye.

As PS is difficult to recycle and a series of EU plastic bans are about to take effect, downstream customers in the European PS market have been looking for alternative materials, which has depressed the future expectations of the PS mark.

The recycling of PS requires a whole-of-society respon.

Commercial success is far from here

Cooper said Agilyx is not too concerned about the price dynamics of styrene or polystyrene in Europe due to the nature of their wo.

However, analysts from ICIS said that in the past few months, with the slowdown of macroeconomic growth in the EU, upstream styrene supply continued to grow, and the market demand for derivatives PS and EPS was insufficient, and PS prices fell sharp.

ICIS believes that Agilyx's PS recycling plant is a step in the right direction, but the success of its operations in the EU has yet to be verified by the mark.