Imperial is considering constructing an advanced recycling facility in Sarnia with the capacity to process over 300 Olympic sized swimming pools of plastic bags.
Chemicals Planning and Basic Chemicals Manager Kathy Porter tells Sarnia News Today they would use technology similar to what ExxonMobil has at its newly commissioned, large scale, plastic waste advanced recycling facility in Baytown, Texas.
"The Baytown facility is one of North America's largest advanced recycling facilities and it uses proprietary technology to break down very difficult to recycle plastics and helps transform them into raw materials that are used for new products," Porter said.
The facility would be capable of processing approximately 80 million pounds of plastic waste per year.
"Which would help support our goals of getting to a circular economy for post use plastics and it will divert additional plastics from landfill or incineration," she said.
The facility would be located right at the Sarnia refinery and use Imperial's existing manufacturing processes.
"So, it's basically an add-on to our existing facility to enable the plastic waste to be co-fed into our conversion units, in addition to our regular hydrocarbon feedstock," said Porter.
As for an exact timeline for the project, Porter said it's a bit early to discuss one.
"We are developing the details and working through a lot of the project planning with folks onsite, as well as leveraging what we're already doing in Baytown," she said.
Porter said ExxonMobil's overall goal is to process one billion pounds of plastic waste globally by the end of 2026.
"When we think of the 'difficult to recycle plastics', some examples are chip bags, where there's one layer on the inside to protect the food and one layer on the outside to protect against the environment, Amazon mailers... any type of material that has more than one type of plastic is really not practical to be able to be recycled by mechanical recycling," said Porter. "So, that's where our advanced recycling, or chemical recycling, comes into play."
A video explaining ExxonMobil's Exxtend technology for advanced recycling can be viewed below.