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Every year, mountains of plastic waste pile up faster than most recycling systems can handle them, and a lot of it, especially mixed or contaminated plastics, simply cannot be melted down and reused the way a clean, sorted bottle can. That gap is where a technology called chemical recycling comes in. Rather than physically reshaping plastic, chemical recycling breaks it down at the molecular level, turning it back into liquid feedstocks that refineries and chemical plants can use as raw material, much like crude oil. The process can also work on heavy hydrocarbons such as bitumen, converting thick, low value oil into lighter, more usable products.
The appeal is that chemical recycling can handle plastics that mechanical recycling leaves behind, including multilayer packaging, flexible films, and materials mixed with contaminants. There are several routes within the category, and they are not interchangeable. Pyrolysis and gasification, often grouped together as conversion methods, break mixed plastic waste into an oil like or gas like feedstock using heat and controlled chemical reactions. Depolymerization, sometimes called chemolysis, instead breaks plastics down into their original building blocks, called monomers, so they can be rebuilt into new plastic of similar quality to virgin material. For heavy oil and bitumen, a related water-based approach can strip away impurities and lighten the material.
Interest in these technologies has grown as governments tighten packaging waste rules and large consumer brands commit to using more recycled content, though capacity remains small compared with the scale of global plastic waste. Industry groups note that only a fraction of the plastic collected in regions such as Europe is recycled, with much of the rest incinerated, landfilled, or exported, which is part of why chemical recycling is pursued as a complement to, not a replacement for, mechanical recycling. Hurdles remain, including the cost of first of a kind plants and proving pilot scale chemistry holds up at larger volume.
Aduro Clean Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: ADUR, TSX: ACT) is one of the companies working on this problem. The company provided a business update covering pilot plant operations, engineering progress, and commercialization plans. Aduro’s Hydrochemolytic Process uses water as a key ingredient in a low temperature chemistry platform designed to convert waste plastics and heavy hydrocarbons into liquid feedstocks, and the company is working to move that process from its current pilot plant into a first commercial scale facility at the Chemelot industrial park in the Netherlands.
The standout achievement in the update was on the technical side. Aduro reported that its Next Generation Process pilot plant completed a 47-hour continuous run using polypropylene recovered from waste plastic. After reaching steady state within about 12 hours, the plant held that operation for another 35 hours and recovered approximately 86% of the polypropylene’s mass as liquid hydrocarbons, with most of that liquid falling into a lighter, more valuable range. The company said steady state conditions could be restored within about two hours after intentional changes to operating settings, a sign of stability that matters for a plant meant to run continuously.
