Together with Intecsa Industrial, gr3n will construct a “First-of-a-Kind” (FOAK) manufacturing facility in Spain. Construction is expected to start in Q4 2024 and be completed by 2027. Gr3n has committed to creating a joint venture with its stakeholder Intecsa Industrial to become the top supplier of enhanced recycled PET in the world.
By 2027, gr3n SA and Intecsa Industrial plan to generate 40,000 tons of PET that have been previously used. According to a joint press release from gr3n SA and Intecsa Industrial, gr3n’s innovative chemical recycling technology can process PET from a variety of industries, including textile waste, closing the loop for hard-to-recycle PET applications.
Maurizio Crippa, the founder and CEO of gr3n, said, “This is a major step for gr3n since it will help us to grow even further, showing enhanced recycling is something concrete and that it is viable to deliver MADE, our Microwave Assisted Depolymerization, to market. Moving forward with one of them “is further confirmation of their trust, as well as of the strength of the data and the results generated,” says Gr3n’s CEO. “Shareholders have the full view on gr3n’s operations.”
The technique developed by gr3n has the potential to revolutionize PET recycling globally, providing enormous advantages to the polyester value chain as a whole as well as the recycling industry. There have been numerous attempts in the past to bring enhanced recycling from research labs to the manufacturing sector, but the economics and skepticism of the early adopters have consistently stymied the adoption of the suggested solutions.
The MADE technology created by gr3n has made it possible to implement this strategy, making gr3n one of the few businesses with the potential to offer a trustworthy enhanced recycling solution that closes the life cycle of PET, and also provides food-grade polymer material, processes a wide range of waste, and reduces the carbon footprint of these materials, which are typically destined for landfill or incineration, added the release.
The director of Intecsa Industrial’s commercial and new business sections, Ramiro Prieto, stated: “gr3n has the potential to revolutionize the recycling industry because their technology enables us to address issues that other technologies cannot.
This entails increasing the amount of raw materials that can be recycled and swiftly implementing the circular economy. We are on the board as an industrial partner and stakeholder, but we have also had the chance to work on the industrial plant’s fundamental engineering. Therefore, we have a solid understanding of the technology that, in our opinion, is now prepared to advance.
“We’re incredibly impressed by the fantastic things gr3n is doing and how they’ve been pushing the boundaries of technology, and we think that gr3n’s technology will play a significant role in the development of the PET industry’s closed loop. Our collaboration with gr3n is a reflection of our commitment to hastening the application of Intecsa’s broad technological and operational know-how in industrial units.
According to Ernesto De La Serna, head of innovations and innovation at Intecsa Industrial, “We at Intecsa are sure that this will change the game. The first industrial-scale MADE PET recycling facility in the world will be able to process post-industrial and post-consumer PET waste, including waste that is difficult to recycle and will use the recycled monomers to create about 40,000 tons of virgin PET chips, saving close to 2 million tons of CO2 over the course of its operational life.
The post-consumer and/or post-industrial polyesters will come from textiles (100 percent polyester but also combinations of other materials like PU, cotton, polyether, polyurea, etc. with up to 30 percent presence in the raw textile) and bottles (colored, colorless, transparent, opaque).
The MADE plant’s technical principle is to disassemble PET into its constituent monomers, which can then be endlessly re-polymerized to create brand-new virgin PET or any other polymer utilizing one of the monomers.
Given that the recycled product has the same functionality as that derived traditionally, the polymers obtained can be utilized to create new bottles/trays, new clothing, and/or other products, effectively totally replacing the feedstock material from fossil fuels. This suggests that by switching from a linear to a circular system, gr3n may be able to achieve bottle-to-textile, textile-to-textile, or even textile-to-bottle recycling.
