EXXONMOBIL BATON ROUGE THE ADVANCED RECYCLING OPPORTUNITY

ADVANCED RECYCLING, also known as chemical recycling or molecular recycling, refers to processes that break down hardto-recycle plastic waste into raw materials that can be used to make new products. With this technology, more plastic materials can be recycled, especially plastics that aren’t easily recycled today. ExxonMobil is hoping to bring an advanced recycling project to Baton Rouge that will have positive benefits for Louisiana as a whole.

“This is new technology,” says Jennifer Purpera, ExxonMobil’s Planning and Energy Department Head. There are many opportunities to collaborate with the state, city and community to help achieve new recycling goals.

ExxonMobil built its first large-scale plastic waste advanced recycling facility in Baytown, Texas, and it is one of the largest of its kind in North America. ExxonMobil is assessing other locations around the world, including the Gulf Coast.

Many food containers are not able to be recycled using traditional means and have to be discarded, usually in landfills, because traditional mechanical recycling has difficulty removing oils, grease or other food waste. Another factor is the packaging itself. When packaging has multiple layers of different types of plastics and other materials, like a chip bag with a plastic outer layer and an aluminum inner layer, it can’t go through the traditional mechanical recycling process. The combination of materials can’t be effectively separated by traditional machines. advanced recycling,” Purpera says. “One of the nice features about advanced recycling is there’s no limit to the number of times those plastics that come from an advanced recycling facility can be recycled.”

Baton Rouge is a great choice for an advanced recycling facility because the city is home to ExxonMobil’s Baton Rouge Refinery, Chemical Plant, Polyolefins Plant and Plastics Plant–all of the integrated facilities necessary for advanced recycling.

Advanced recycling solves these issues by breaking down materials to their molecular level. These molecules become the raw materials used to make brand-new plastics. The process is sometimes referred to as circular plastic, meaning the materials constantly flow around a “closed-loop” system rather than being used once and then discarded.

“Existing plastics are reprocessed during

ExxonMobil recently doubled its polypropylene production capacity with the successful startup of its new polypropylene production unit at the Polyolefins Plant in Baton Rouge. The sites are highly integrated, so the stream of raw materials that come out of the advanced recycling facility at the Refinery could be fed into the Polyolefins Plant to meet growing demand for certified-circular products for food packaging, personal hygiene products, medical equipment and more.

“I think we have all the right building blocks here in Baton Rouge, especially now that we’ve expanded the Polyolefins Plant, to bring that type of advanced recycling facility to our area,” Purpera says.