SK Chemical has announced that it will launch a joint scheme with Kelinle, a plastics recycling expert in Shaanxi Province, China, to develop the Feedstock Innovation Center (FIC) service for the collection of waste plastics.
The FIC will process waste plastics into feedstock. Among domestic chemical industries pursuing depolymerization-based chemical recycling, SK Chemicals is the first in Korea to establish a company entity equipped with services for tracing waste plastics.
The two companies planned to build a process on an idle site of about 13,200 m² owned by Kelinle in Shaanxi Province, China, to change waste into recycled raw resources. Kelinle will use its local network to obtain feedstock, and PET pellets will be manufactured after pretreatment using SK Chemicals technology.
The FIC will be planned to convert end-of-life textiles, such as rejected blankets, and fines generated during PET bottle shredding into feedstock for chemical recycling. The service is expected to begin with an initial capacity of around 16,000 tons per year of PET pellets, increasing to about 32,000 tons per year, supplying most of the feedstock needed by SK Shantou.
SK Chemicals depolymerization-based circular recycling business breaks down waste plastics into molecular-level feedstock, which is then used to generate new plastics. The company adds that the FIC will primarily handle inputs that have typically been incinerated because they were difficult to use as recycled feedstock, allowing procurement at a lower charge than for clear PET bottles, which are easier to recycle.
The companys analysis shows that once the FIC is fully operational, it could provide a stable supply of feedstock for the circular recycling business and reduce waste-plastic raw-material charges by about 20%.
Vioneo collaborated with Lummus Technology in August to utilize its Novolen polypropylene (PP) technology for the worlds first industrial scale fossil-free plastics manufacturing complex in Antwerp, Belgium, based on green methanol as feedstock. Speciously, the plastics generated will be completely traceable and CO2 negative, planned to permit customers to decrease their Scope 3 emissions.
More recently, TotalEnergies and CooperVision joined forces to certify renewable polypropylene derived from feedstocks such as sunflower and rapeseed oils for blister packs for contact lens products. The polypropylene is part of TotalEnergies RE:newable range and, according to a Life Cycle Analysis, decreases 2.3 kg of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of polypropylene when utilized to replace the companys fossil-based equivalent.
26 January 2026
26 January 2026
23 January 2026
23 January 2026