Dow cancels chemical recycling plant in Europe
US materials firm Dow is the latest in a line of companies scrapping plans for recycling plants. The company has abandoned the construction of what it claims would have been the largest chemical recycling plant in Europe, as reported by S&P Global. The facility, to have been developed with technology partner Mura Technology, was to have been built on Dow's site in Böhlen, Germany, with a capacity of 120,000 tonnes/year.
This announcement follows Dow’s plans to downsize its European operations, to reduce costs and adapt its portfolio to suit market conditions, by shutting three plants in Germany and the UK. These include an ethylene cracker in Böhlen, a chlor-alkali and vinyl plant in Schkopau, and a siloxane plant in Barry, South Wales. This will result in a loss of over 800 jobs.
Thus, the cancellation of the recycling facility follows Dow's decision to permanently close the Böhlen steam cracker in 2027. The recycling plant was supposed to supply a sustainable alternative to naphtha as a cracker feedstock. With the closure of the cracker, the economic prospects for the recycling plant are also no longer feasible. The cracker has been out of service since July due to a technical malfunction.
Mura's HydroPRS (Hydrothermal Plastic Recycling Solution) technology uses supercritical steam to recycle all forms of plastic, including flexible and multi-layer plastics, which have previously been deemed unrecyclable, into oil and chemical building blocks.
In 2023, Mura opened the world’s first commercial-scale Hydro-PRT advanced plastic recycling plant in Teesside, UK,
Dow and Mura announced plans for the plant in 2022 as part of a broader collaboration to realise 600,000 tonnes of chemical recycling capacity in Europe and the US by 2030 and to achieve Dow's goal of recycling 1 million tonnes of plastic by 2030.
Other recycling plants recently cancelled include Finnish chemical recycler Neste and Belgian materials supplier Ravago pyrolysis plant in Vlissingen, Netherlands; and Austrian polyolefins maker Borealis’s mechanical recycling plant for polyolefin waste at its site in Schwechat, Austria,
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