Eastman secures feedstock agreements for planned recycling facility in France

Kingsport, Tennessee-based specialty materials company Eastman says 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 company says 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 one 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,” Eastman Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Brad Lich says. “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.”

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Citeo, a 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 foundation for securing French-sourced waste for its project in France.

Eastman says it also has reached an additional agreement with Interzero, a plastics recycler that claims the largest sorting capacity in Europe, for an additional 25,000 metric tons of scrap in addition to the 20,000 metric tons 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,” says 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 (polyethylene terephthalate) waste that cannot be recycled mechanically.”

Eastman adds that it reached another agreement with a company in the waste management and recycling ecosystem at the end of last year that will add approximately 30,000 metric tons of waste. The company recently shared the decision to build the facility in two phases, which will allow it to recycle over 200,000 metric tons of hard-to-recycled polyester scrap annually, most of which is currently landfilled or incinerated. Due to updated plans, the company now expects the first phase of the project to be mechanically complete in 2026 and process 100,000 metric tons.

“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 tons to over 200,000 metric tons annually,” says JP Kuijpers, managing director of EMEA and director of Eastman circular solutions in France.

Eastman says it will use its Polyester Renewal Technology (PRT) in France to recycle hard-to-recycle plastic scrap that remains in a linear economy today. The company’s technology allows this hard-to-recycle scrap 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 says its 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 says it can transform scrap plastic into like-new food contact polyesters with lower greenhouse gas emissions than traditional methods.

In addition to the announced plant in France, Eastman says it is investing in two other molecular recycling plants in the U.S.—Kingsport, Tennessee, and another site to be announced later this year, with an expected combined global investment of approximately $2.25 billion for all three facilities.