Dealing with Plastics the Chemical Way By James Reed

Here is excellent news for those who love plastics as much as me, but fear the Greenies moving on items, such as the disgraceful banning of plastic spoons, knives ands folks, which were truly a convenient invention. And as far as I am concerned, any creature dumb enough to swallow a plastic knife, deserves natural selection. But, I digress.

It seems that an Aussie company called Licella has worked out a way of turning plastic back into oil. There you go, with a bit of enemy and some chemical wizardry, many problems can be solved, at least those in realistic bite-size pieces.

https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2022/12/01/plastic-global-solution-kohler/

“One of the more hopeful inventions for the planet has come out of the University of Sydney and is being commercialised worldwide by an Australian company that is supported by some big global packaging and chemical firms.

The company is called Licella, founded and run by an organic chemist named Dr Len Humphreys, and the process for which it has global patents turns plastic back into oil, and biomass (plant waste) into fuels.

Last week, Licella got a $12 million grant from the federal government to help build a plastic recycling plant on land owned by Dow Chemical in Altona, Victoria. It is also working on a factory in north Queensland to turn sugar cane waste into biocrude, which can be made into aviation fuel.

The first commercial plastic-to-oil plant will be in Wilton in the north of England, also in partnership with Dow. It will start operating in March next year.

How it started

It has been a 17-year journey for Len Humphreys.

In 2005, he was working on biodiesel – that is, turning leftover vegetable oil into diesel – when he and Professor Thomas Maschmeyer of the University of Sydney decided to see if a way could be found to turn biomass, and then plastic, into oil to make renewable fuels and chemicals – that is, plastic.

They came up with what they call the Cat-HTR process, which stands for catalytic hydrothermal reactor. It’s basically a fancy way of saying it uses heat and water to liquify solids, such as plastic, and plant material.

Professor Maschmeyer won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation in 2020, partly for the plastic recycling process, but also for his work on zinc bromide batteries for storing renewable energy.

The two chemists built their first pilot plant in 2008, in Somersby on the NSW central coast.

Dr Humphreys says the unique part of Licella’s platform is the use of water, which controls the break-down of the polymers within the plastic and allows it to convert economically into oil.

He says the process can be used on all types of plastic – hard and soft – as well as mixed and layered plastic packaging, where the plastic is combined with paper or other contaminants, not normally recyclable.

How it’s going

Licella has been working successfully with Nestle to use KitKat wrappers, which combine metal and plastic, to produce Australia’s first soft plastic food wrapper with recycled content.

By the way, it’s handy that it works on soft plastic because it emerged last weekend that REDcycle, the company that has been picking up plastic bags from Coles and Woolworths, has actually been stockpiling it since 2018 in warehouses around the country.

Licella is an unlisted public company with about 500 shareholders, Dr Humphreys is CEO.

It has kept the Australia and New Zealand rights to the technology, and is building the Altona plant. It has also given a licence covering the rest of the world to a company called Mura, which is 30 per cent owned by Licella, 35 per cent by UK high-net worth individuals and the rest by Dow Chemicals, Chevron, LG Chemicals and KBR (Kellogg, Brown and Root), who are funding the plant in Wilton.”