Waste runs out for recycling plant

There's a lot of rubbish in Germany, but not enough for BASF. A shortage of recyclable packaging material has forced the company to close an experimental feedstock recycling plant at its Ludwigshafen base.

The BASF recycling process was developed in 1994, in response to a call from Duales System Deutschland, the German recycling authority, for ways to reuse packaging plastics. As part of its bid to capture this free feedstock, the company developed a process involving heating mixed, shredded plastic waste until it decomposed into shorter-chain hydrocarbons, which could then be fed into a cracker to produce simple olefins; and built a 15 000t/a pilot plant for the process. However, the company says, a combination of circumstances has now rendered the plant redundant.

First, the plant is too small for commercial operation. The minimum capacity to render the process economically viable is 150 000t/a, the company says. Originally, DSD estimated that there would be 750 000t/a of waste plastic available for feedstock recycling. However, it turned out that barely 400 000t/a was available, for which there was already sufficient recycling capacity available elsewhere.

This rendered the pilot plant useful only as a research tool, says BASF, but the process `has now been developed to a stage where no more can be learned from pilot operation.'

The company is not writing off its experience, however. It aims to make its technology available to licensees and joint-venture partners. Moreover, it adds, it is in talks with Veba Oel, one of the companies with existing recycling capacity, to see if BASF's technology could contribute to or even improve the Veba process.