Neste commissions facility for liquefied waste plastic

“The successful commissioning proves that we can process LWP at an industrial scale. This achievement demonstrates Neste's capability to develop advanced technology, set safety standards, and create new supply chains for challenging new raw materials. We are proud of this achievement, and I want to express my sincere thanks to our partners and employees whose dedication has allowed us to turn this vision into a reality,” said Jori Sahlsten, Executive Vice President of Oil Products at Neste.

Neste has processed LWP (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 LPW 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.

“We enable the scale-up of chemical recycling by upgrading LPW. The plastic originates from low-quality waste streams not suitable for mechanical recycling and destined for incineration or landfills. Thanks to our new facility, even hard-to-recycle plastic waste can be upgraded to meet the feedstock quality requirements of companies manufacturing high-quality plastics. However, the current European Commission’s calculation rules on recycled content in the Single Use Plastics Directive threaten to limit the ability of refineries to serve EU’s recycled content targets. For Europe's competitiveness sake, we need to ensure the calculation rules are amended to include refineries in the context of the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation,” commented Maiju Helin, Director of Polymers and Chemicals at Neste.

In the new upgrading facility, Neste processes LWP 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^TM 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.

Read the article online at: https://www.hydrocarbonengineering.com/petrochemicals/17032026/neste-commissions-facility-for-liquefied-waste-plastic/