Global plastic bottle recycling rate is less than 50%. Chemical companies focus on waste plastic recycling

Pan Lumin, President of the Asia Pacific Polyurethanes Group of the U.S. chemical company Huntsman Group, said at the Shanghai Media Exchange that the company ’s new polyurethane plant in Taiwan, China is expected to be completed by mid-2020, and its full capacity will reach 33,000 tons per year. 360 million recycled PET plastic bottles. He said that with the gradual promotion and implementation of waste classification, the conditions for building PET recycling facilities in mainland China are becoming more mature in the future.

Focus on waste plastic recycling

In recent years, environmental protection has become a hot topic, especially the recycling of plastic waste has received widespread attention. The current global problem of waste plastics is becoming increasingly serious. It is understood that currently the world will increase approximately 1 million waste plastic bottles per minute, and only less than 50% of plastic bottles will be recycled. According to a report released by the Allen MacArthur Foundation, if this problem is not resolved, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050.

Pan Lumin introduced that Huntsman began to pay attention to the recycling of PET plastic bottles more than 20 years ago, and developed a set of recovery systems and product solutions. After multiple strict processing procedures, it was used with other raw materials in chemical reaction devices. The reaction produces polyester polyol products. Up to 60% of the product ingredients come from recycled PET plastic bottles, and polyester polyols are one of the important raw materials used to produce polyurethane materials. It is reported that polyurethane is an emerging organic polymer material and is known as the "fifth largest plastic". Its application fields include light industry, chemical industry, electronics, textile, medical, construction, building materials, automotive, defense, aerospace, aviation, etc .

"At present, Huntsman can effectively recycle 1 billion 500ml PET plastic bottles each year. There are about 200 billion waste plastic bottles in Mainland China a year, and we believe it is not a problem to find an appropriate source of recycled materials. For promotion, the conditions for building a factory in mainland China are already very mature. "Pan Lumin told reporters that Huntsman will also consider building a PET recycling device in mainland China.

Asia Pacific headquarters settled in Shanghai

It is understood that Huntsman Group, founded in 1970, is a publicly listed global special and specialty chemical manufacturing and sales company in the United States. The company currently has four business units, polyurethane, functional products, advanced materials and textile dyeing, and operates more than 75 production, research and development and management institutions in more than 30 countries around the world.

In 1992, Huntsman established the first foreign technical service center for polyurethane industry in China; in 1996, as the first foreign polyurethane system material factory, Huntsman Polyurethane (China) Co., Ltd. was officially put into production; in 2006, Huntsman built the first world-scale large-scale polyurethane MDI plant with an annual production capacity of 160,000 tons in August 2018. The second phase of the project was expanded and put into operation, with an additional investment of 5 billion yuan, totaling an annual production capacity of 400,000 tons.

The Huntsman Asia-Pacific R & D Center (ATC), which was established in the Minhang Economic and Technological Development Zone in Shanghai in 2008, has completed two phases of construction and now covers an area of 19,000 square meters with a total cost of 280 million yuan. , Has become one of the world's three major research and development centers Huntsman Group.

It is understood that in 2018, Huntsman Group's operating income was approximately US $ 9 billion, of which 50% came from the polyurethane division. As the earliest global polyurethane giant entering China, in the past 30 years, Huntsman Group has invested a total of 15 billion yuan in China. At present, China's performance has made greater financial contributions to the entire Huntsman Group. On November 20 this year, the Huntsman Group Asia Pacific regional headquarters was formally settled in Shanghai, strengthening the Chinese market's engine position in Huntsman's global strategic development.