Honeywell, Avangard Innovative form joint venture to chemically recycle plastics

Honeywell, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, has announced the formation of a second joint venture to deploy its UpCycle Process Technology to chemically recycle end-of-life plastics into polymer feedstock that can be used to produce new plastic. The company is partnering with Houston-based Avangard Innovative to build an advanced recycling plant in Waller, Texas.

In November 2021, Honeywell announced its partnership with Sacyr, a global engineering and services company headquartered in Madrid that has operations in more than 20 countries worldwide. Honeywell and Sacyr’s joint venture is planned for Andalucía, in southern Spain. Like Honeywell’s partnership with Avangard, that facility also will be able to process 30,000 metric tons of mixed plastics annually, with production expected to begin in 2023. Carrie Eppelheimer, chief commercial officer at Honeywell Sustainable Technology Solutions, declines to say what the expected output of the system will be, adding, “I know we have high yields.”

Avangard Innovative provides waste management and recycling services to businesses and mechanically recycles low-density and linear-low-density polyethylene film in Houston and Waller. It will be the first U.S. company to deploy Honeywell’s UpCycle Process Technology, with production anticipated to begin in 2023, Honeywell says.

“The UpCycle Process Technology expands the types of plastics that can be recycled to include waste plastic that would otherwise go unrecycled, enabling Honeywell to play a key role in driving a circular plastics economy,” says Vimal Kapur, president and chief executive officer of Honeywell Performance Materials and Technologies.

Honeywell says that when its technology is used with mechanical recycling and other chemical recycling processes, along with improvements to collection and sorting, it potentially can increase the amount of postuse plastic that can be recycled to 90 percent.

“Working with Honeywell on a joint advanced recycling plant allows Avangard Innovative to reinforce its mission to preserve and protect the environment by targeting zero waste to landfill,” says Rick Perez, CEO of Avangard Innovative. “The Honeywell solution employs a modular approach to plant design, enabling a straightforward deployment and installation while striking the right balance between economy of scale and amount of waste plastic generated locally.”

A history of commercialization

Eppelheimer says Honeywell has a history of commercializing sustainable technology, particularly in the oil and gas and petrochemical markets. That commercialization includes Solstice, low-global-warming-potential hydrofluoroolefin refrigerants, aerosols, solvents and blowing agents, and Ecofining, a process that converts nonedible natural oils, animal fats and other waste feedstocks into Honeywell Green Diesel and Honeywell Green Jet Fuel.

She says the company’s Ecofining technology is more than a decade old. Similar to what the company is doing with end-of-life plastics, the process takes what otherwise would be considered waste and converts it into “a viable drop-in renewable fuel that reduces greenhouse gas emissions 60 to 80 percent or more.”

She adds, “That experience showed us how to engage different parts of the marketplace.”

Honeywell recognizes that waste management and recycling companies will be key to the successful commercialization of UpCycle Process Technology, Eppelheimer says. “But we see that it needs to go a step further where we need to partner with them.” This realization has led to the formation of the joint ventures with Sacyr and Avangard Innovative.

She says companies such as these “bring their expertise on the variability of waste, the collection of waste, the sortation of waste,” while Honeywell understands “the conversion of the molecules, the molecule management, contaminant management.” Honeywell also has existing partnerships with the downstream petrochemical partners that will consume the products generated by the process.

“Being able to do this through a joint venture, where both of us are owning and operating [it], we will learn and accelerate the growth of the industry through that approach,” Eppelheimer adds.

Avangard Innovative’s strengths

The Waller plant, which will be approximately the size of two football fields, likely is the first in the Avangard joint venture. Eppelheimer says Avangard Innovative is looking to expand the technology across all its plants throughout the United States. “It also has operations across nine other countries. And in all of those cases, it complements their existing mechanical recycling infrastructure,” she says.

Avangard’s customers include consumer packaged goods companies and big-box retailers that generate considerable volumes of packaging films. The company is bringing its knowledge of these materials to the partnership. The joint venture also is allowing the company to expand the materials it can collect and recycle in-house.  

Eppelheimer says mechanical recycling has “limitations” that can be addressed through chemical recycling, allowing Avangard to increase its clients’ recycling rates.

Avangard Innovative is “effectively and efficiently” recycling LDPE and LLDPE film currently, she adds. UpCycle Process Technology will allow the company to recycle “lower quality films and packaging and polystyrene materials and other types of materials.”

Avangard’s Perez adds, “Avangard Innovative's purpose is to achieve a world without waste. Our current mechanical recycling capabilities can take us so far in the quest to achieve ‘zero-waste-to-landfill’ because there are different types of plastic and other materials that can only be recycled through chemical processes.

"Chemical recycling breaks materials down on a molecular level so they can be recycled as new materials with high quality and performance properties, which can be used in any application," he continues. "By adding chemical recycling capabilities to our already industry-leading mechanical recycling, we will expand the amount of waste material that can be recycled, diverting as much as 90 percent of waste from landfills and our environment."

Perez says the joint venture with Honeywell "seemed a natural and powerful partnership as we continue to close the loop on our circular economy models. Honeywell's UpCycle Process Technology adds tremendous value to our current collection, sorting and transformation processes and helps us leverage the strength of our supply chain and offer manufacturers access to more recycled materials.”

The technology

Honeywell’s UpCycle Process Technology was created within Honeywell’s Sustainable Technology Solutions (STS) business, which is part of Honeywell UOP. The company started looking into advanced recycling in 2019, Eppelheimer says, in response to growing demand to increase plastics recycling.

She adds that the company’s 100 years in molecular management meant it could contribute to a global solution. Its chemical recycling process is based on pyrolysis, which uses heat in the absence of oxygen to break down polymers.

The technology produces 77 percent less CO2 emissions than incineration or landfilling, she adds, and the resulting product can be used in the production of new plastics at a 25 percent blend rate.

Honeywell’s UpCycle Process Technology is an end-to-end solution, Eppleheimer says, that includes pretreatment, contaminant management and pyrolysis.

According to the company, its technology produces “high-quality recycled polymer feedstock” that “needs less hydrotreating or preprocessing, resulting in higher blend limits and greater recycled plastic production while displacing fossil feedstock and preventing conventional waste handling.”

Given the volume of film that Avangard will be processing with the technology, Eppelheimer says some “minor” modifications could need to be made to the design of the system’s pretreatment. “But, generally speaking, it is still an end-to-end solution pretreatment plus pyrolysis as part of that operation,” she adds.

Honeywell’s UpCycle Process Technology can handle mixed plastics, though some polymers must be limited.

“PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in too large of an amount becomes contamination,” Eppleheimer says. “We can handle some amounts of PET, particularly because of our contaminant management, which we think is a differentiator for us from other technologies we've seen to date on the market. Similarly with PVC (polyvinyl chloride). PVC creates chlorines, for example, which is very undesirable in the petrochemical processing industry. We can actually take more PVC in on the front end … than others we’re seeing on the marketplace.”

She adds that the technology can handle as much as 4 percent PVC and 20 percent polystyrene.  

Eppelheimer says Honeywell’s UpCycle Process Technology is designed for the greatest carbon yield. “We've created a full-range product for the petchem industry that allows for the highest amount of plastic back to plastic as opposed to having co-products that would be like a waxy product or something that gets converted into fuels,” she says.

The contaminant management aspect of the technology addresses nonplastics, such as metals, as well as different types of chemicals and additives that might be on packaging and the chlorine in PVC, for example. Each aspect of the process has contaminant management, from pretreatment to pyrolysis to postpyrolysis, Eppelheimer notes.   

She adds that the technology is modular “to enable speed and simplicity of operation, scale-up and consistency of operation.”

Honeywell’s technology also offers lower greenhouse gas emissions than comparable technologies that have been commercialized to date, Eppelheimer adds. 

“Chemical recycling is a critical part of the solution” for ending plastic waste in the environment and reducing CO2 emissions globally," she says. “We're commercializing UpCycle Process Technology to help meet that vision. It is just one of a portfolio of sustainable technologies at Honeywell. Our designs are focused to deliver greater yield of plastic to plastic, to handle higher levels of contamination to handle the variation that just naturally is going to exist in waste and to have not only a modular design but to be able to provide the services necessary so that waste management companies can expand into this new and emerging industry and do so while lowering greenhouse gas emissions.”