Eni and COREPLA, the National Consortium for the Collection, Recycling and Recovery of Plastic Packaging, have today signed an agreement aimed at launching research projects to produce hydrogen from non-recyclable plastic packaging waste.
The agreement, which was signed by Giuseppe Ricci, Eni Chief Refining & Marketing Officer, and by Antonio Ciotti, President of COREPLA, defines the establishment of a joint working group that will evaluate the start of research projects in the next six months to produce high quality hydrogen and biofuels from plastic waste. The working group will analyze the evolutions that the non-mechanically recyclable packaging market will have in the coming years and will study the types of waste that can be used to develop a virtuous and innovative circular economy process and maximize recovery, in line with the new directives. European.
With the separate collection, plastic packaging is in fact selected and sent for recycling to be reused, mainly through the transformation into flakes and granules, and then becomes a raw material useful to create new products. Not everything, however, can be recycled: the so-called plasmix, a set of post-consumer packaging made of heterogeneous plastics that today can not find an outlet in the recycling market, is almost exclusively destined to energy recovery and in a small percentage to landfill. Thanks to the agreement signed today, it could instead be recycled and transformed into a new raw material.
With this agreement Eni strengthens and develops its own strategic path of application of the circular economy principles to business, thanks to research and developed technologies. Thanks to the Ecofining ™ patent from 2014 it produces in Porto Marghera, and soon also in Gela, high quality biofuels from used edible and frying oils, animal fats and other non edible waste through a process in which hydrogen is an essential component for neutralize the oxygen of vegetable oils and convert the triglycerides into isoparaffins and paraffins, completely eliminating the presence of sulfur, nitrogen and polyaromatics in the biofuel. Another important element of Eni's circular economy is the "Waste to fuel": a pilot plant was created in Gela to test the production of bio oil and bio methane from the organic fraction of solid urban waste (FORSU), whose results will be fundamental for the announced industrial scale realization of plants in Ravenna, in Porto Marghera and in perspective in other disused industrial sites in Italy and also abroad.
COREPLA, a supply chain consortium that counts over 2600 companies, has always been committed to better management of the end of life of plastic packaging, also through information and awareness activities for citizens, institutions and businesses, and actively supports applied research with the aim of develop new industrial and market opportunities for collected waste.