Green news: Neste upgrades facility for liquefied waste plastic and scales up chemical recycling; Indorama Ventures to build rPET plant in Nigeria by 2027

Finland’s Neste says it has successfully commissioned its new upgrading facility for liquefied waste plastic (LWP) at its Porvoo refinery in Finland. This EUR111 million investment marks a major milestone in the scale-up of chemical recycling, enabling the production of high-quality feedstock for the plastics and chemicals industry. With an annual capacity to process up to 150,000 tonnes of liquefied waste plastic, the facility is the world’s largest LWP upgrading facility, and processing will be gradually ramped up.

Neste says it has processed liquefied waste plastic (e.g. pyrolysis oil) since 2020. The construction of the new upgrading facility and its integration to the existing oil refinery began in 2023 and was completed at the end of 2025. Production ramp-up was commenced in 2026 and will advance gradually depending on market and legislation development.

The new facility allows Neste to close the quality gap between crude liquefied plastic waste and the high-quality drop-in raw materials required by the petrochemical industry. While mechanical recycling remains essential, it is often limited by the quality of the waste. Neste’s new facility is specifically designed to process oils derived from challenging waste plastic streams – such as multi-layer packaging, mixed plastic waste, and contaminated plastics.

In the new upgrading facility, Neste processes liquefied waste plastic together with crude oil. A mass balance approach is applied to attribute the recycled raw materials used in the process to the recycled Neste RE product. With the use of recycled Neste RE, a reduction of over 70%* in virgin fossil resource consumption (abiotic depletion) and a reduction of over 35% in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be achieved when plastic waste is chemically recycled instead of incinerated and then used to replace fossil feedstock in plastics manufacturing.

To advance the circularity of plastics, Neste, together with its partners Alterra and Technip Energies, also licenses liquefaction technology for chemical recycling of hard-to-recycle plastics.

In other news, Thailand-based Indorama Ventures,Nigerian Breweries, and Genesis Power & Energy Solutions have agreed to set up a large-scale recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET) facility in Lagos, Nigeria.

The planned site is expected to have the capacity to produce up to 45,000 tonnes/year of food-grade rPET resin.

Operations are expected to begin in the first half of 2027.

The facility will process used PET bottles into new packaging materials, addressing demand for recycled content and aiming to reduce plastic waste.

The initiative also plans to improve local collection systems and create jobs within the recycling sector.

Indorama Ventures will provide its expertise in PET recycling while Nigerian Breweries will contribute knowledge of the local beverage market.

Genesis Energy is involved in developing sustainable infrastructure and energy solutions for the project.

Completion of the plant is subject to regulatory approval and technical checks.

If realised as proposed, this would be Indorama Ventures’ first such investment on the African continent and its largest recycling operation globally.

The company currently operates 20 recycling facilities in 11 countries.

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