Recycling: Versalis to start chemical recycling in Italy; LG Energy/Toyota Tsusho in jv for battery recycling in US

Italy's Versalis, Eni’s chemical company, has unveiled at its Mantua site in Italy, a demo plant based on Hoop, the company’s new proprietary technology for the chemical recycling of mixed plastic waste.

This technology, which complements mechanical recycling, makes it possible to convert mixed plastic waste into feedstock that can be used to produce new plastic materials suitable for all applications, including food contact packaging and pharmaceutical packaging.

Hoop was developed through a joint project with Italian engineering firm S.R.S. (Servizi di Ricerche e Sviluppo), combining a high thermal performance pyrolysis reactor with Versalis’s expertise in polymer property analysis and production process optimisation through Artificial Intelligence systems.

Construction of the Hoop demonstration plant, which occupies an area of approximately 5,000 sq m within the Mantua site, began at the end of October 2023.

The plant is capable of processing 6,000 tonnes/year of secondary raw material and will serve to validate the technology application on an industrial scale. Under the Memorandum of Understanding on the Eni-Versalis Chemical Transformation Plan signed last March with the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy (MIMIT) a 40,000-tonne facility is planned for construction at the Priolo site in Sicily. The feasibility study has already been completed and the design phase is currently under way in preparation for the start of the permitting process.

SC-HOOP, Versalis’ project name for the realisation of the demo plant based on Hoop technology at Mantua, is the only Italian large scale project to be awarded funding in the 2023 EU Innovation Fund call, out of 239 proposals submitted and 41 selected overall.

In other news, LG Energy Solution and Toyota Tsusho Corporation have set up Green Metals Battery Innovations, a joint venture company focused on battery recycling. Under the agreement signed by LG Energy Solution Michigan and Toyota Tsusho America, the two partners decided to construct and operate a pre-processing plant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, US.

The new plant will handle pre-processing operations to extract black mass which contains valuable raw metals such as nickel, cobalt, and lithium, by dismantling and shredding battery production scrap. In the initial stage of the joint venture's operation, LG Energy Solution will supply scrap generated during the production of EV batteries for Toyota Motor.

The facility is scheduled to commence operations in 2026, with an objective to achieve maximum annual processing capacity of 13,500 tonnes of scrap — equivalent to over 40,000 automotive batteries.

The extracted black mass will later undergo a separate post-processing stage to recover raw materials contained within. The joint venture seeks to further establish a battery-to-battery closed-loop system where those raw materials are circulated as recycled resources for new battery materials, advancing a true circular economy in the battery supply chain.

This collaboration between LG Energy Solution and the Toyota Group aims to drive carbon emissions down through circular economy initiatives. By partnering with a leading battery recycler equipped with advanced pre-processing technologies and operational know-how, LG Energy Solution intends to secure a competitive recycling infrastructure in the region, it adds.

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