KINGSPORT, Tenn., May 11, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Eastman (NYSE: EMN)
today announced it has secured a significant amount of feedstock
needed for its planned molecular recycling facility in Port Jerome
sur Seine, Normandy, France. With an investment of $1 billion, the planned facility will become the
world's largest material-to-material molecular recycling plant.
"We began the year with roughly half of our feedstock needs
secured for phase 1 of the project, and with these important
additional agreements in place we are moving closer to the more
than 80 percent we expect to secure by year-end," said Brad Lich, executive vice president and chief
commercial officer. "This strong progress is a testament to the
complementary nature of Eastman's innovative molecular recycling
technology to the current mechanical technologies in the market and
to the growing need to enable circularity for more waste streams
going back to high-quality contact-sensitive output."
Citeo, the leading Producer Responsible Organization (PRO) in
France, recently announced that
Eastman, in a commercial partnership with Paprec, France's leading integrated waste management
company, has been selected to receive a significant amount of
feedstock for the methanolysis facility in Normandy. The Citeo
agreement to secure French household waste has provided Eastman
with a strong foundation for securing French-sourced waste for its
project in France.
Eastman also shared it has reached an additional agreement with
Interzero, an innovation leader in plastics recycling with the
largest sorting capacity in Europe, for an additional 25,000 metric tonnes
of waste in addition to the 20,000 metric tonnes from a previous
agreement announced last year.
"We're pleased to grow our initial agreement with Eastman and do
even more to solve the waste crisis we're facing," said
Jacco de Haas, chief commercial
officer of Interzero Plastics Recycling. "Chemical recycling is a
necessary complement to mechanical recycling to keep more raw
materials in the loop. Interzero and Eastman are committed to
creating material circularity and Eastman's facility in
France will process colored and
opaque PET waste that cannot be recycled mechanically."
Another agreement with a leading company in the waste management
and recycling eco-system was reached at the end of last year. This
agreement, adding approximately 30,000 metric tonnes of waste,
allows geographic coverage in strategic waste supplies.
Eastman recently shared the decision to build the facility in
two phases which will allow the facility to recycle over 200,000
metric tonnes of hard-to-recycle polyester waste annually, most of
which is currently landfilled or incinerated today. Due to the
updated plans, the company now expects phase 1 of the project to be
mechanically complete in 2026 and process 100,000 metric
tonnes.
"Going with a phased approach for the project allows for design
changes in the facility to recycle more plastic waste by moving
from the initial estimates of approximately 160,000 metric tonnes
to over 200,000 metric tonnes annually," said JP Kuijpers, managing
director of EMEA and director general of Eastman circular solutions
in France.
Eastman will use its proven Polyester Renewal Technology (PRT)
in France to recycle
hard-to-recycle plastic waste that remains in a linear economy
today. The company's recycling technology allows this
hard-to-recycle waste to be broken down into its molecular building
blocks and then reassembled to become like new material without any
compromise in quality and performance. Eastman's PRT enables the
potentially infinite value of materials by keeping them in
production, lifecycle after lifecycle. With the technology's highly
efficient yield and the renewable energy sources available at the
Normandy location, Eastman can
transform waste plastic into like new food contact polyesters with
lower greenhouse gas emissions than traditional methods.
In addition to this announced plant in France, Eastman is investing in two other
molecular recycling plants in the U.S. - Kingsport, Tennessee, and another U.S site to
be announced later this year with an expected combined global
investment of approximately $2.25
billion for all three facilities.
About Eastman
Founded in 1920, Eastman is a global
specialty materials company that produces a broad range of products
found in items people use every day. For more information,
visit www.eastman.com.
Contacts:
Eastman
Investors: Greg
Riddle / 1-212-835-1620 / griddle@eastman.com
Media: Kristin Parker /
1-423-229-2526 / kristin@eastman.com
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