Coil coatings and industrial paints supplier Beckers Group (Berlin, Germany) is collaborating with suppliers to incorporate raw materials made from recycled plastic into its paints. The ability to turn waste plastic into new raw materials will promote circularity and reduce emissions, the company claims.
Beckers is working with BioBTX, a circular chemistry technology developer, and Symeres, a leading contract research organization specializing in drug discovery and development solutions, to create a supply chain for sustainable aromatic monomers made from plastic waste. BioBTX had developed a method for turning plastic waste into benzene, toluene, and xylene (BTX). Symeres then takes the xylenes and oxidizes them into aromatic phthalic monomers, which Beckers can then use to create resins.
Phthalic anhydride is important for polyester resin production as it is the most commonly used aromatic acid and makes 40-50% of the resins in which it is present. The phthalic anhydride produced by this route can be used as a drop in for existing phthalic anhydride produced from petroleum.
The pilot involves processing mixed plastic waste into sustainable chemical building blocks and, finally, high-value products using multiple advanced sustainable chemical conversions. This includes BioBTX’s unique Integrated Cascading Catalytic Pyrolysis (ICCP) technology to convert mixed waste plastics and biomass into aromatics such as BTX. Beckers is particularly interested in xylenes, which can be oxidized to produce monomers, such as phthalic anhydride, to be used in polyester resins for coatings.
“Nobody has ever created a coil coating containing phthalic anhydride made from plastic waste, so this world first is an important step forward in terms of producing more sustainable resins and paints,” says Julien Marquiant, resin lab manager at Beckers. “It really is a game changer for us and our ability to incorporate high-quality materials made from plastic waste.”
“In order to reach a fully circular economy, we will need to make use of all different types of carbon resources to substitute for all the fossil resources used nowadays,” says Ton Vries, managing director at BioBTX. “The collaboration with Beckers proves that circular solutions can already be realized if parties from different industries join forces. In this case it does not only prevent the plastic waste from growing, it also simultaneously substitutes the need for fossil-based resources.”
The pilot is still being developed but can have significant sustainability benefits. Besides upcycling thousands of tonnes of plastic waste into high-value products, early estimates suggest that the process has the potential to reduce white coating carbon emissions by at least 10% using such recycled material compared with virgin raw materials.
Beckers will validate the quality and sustainability of the phthalic anhydride produced by Symeres using the BioBTX xylene, and is actively looking for a potential partner to develop and license this technology over the next three to five years.
Source: Beckers Group, www.beckers-group.com.