Toyo Styrene’s facility will involve in the recycling of post-use polystyrene back to styrene monomer
Toyo Styrene has licenced Agilyx’s technology to recycle post-use polystyrene. (Credit: Ulrike Mai from Pixabay)
Toyo Styrene, an affiliate of Denka Company, has licenced Agilyx’s technology for the recycling of post-use polystyrene and reduce the impact on the environment.
The move will allow Agilyx to deliver circular pathways for plastics in the Asian markets, as well as helps to extend its market presence to deliver a circular solution for post-consumer polystyrene in Japan.
Toyo Styrene will deploy Agilyx’s site technology at its facility in the Chiba Prefecture of Japan.
Agilyx CEO Joe Vaillancourt said: “We are excited to be working with a group that shares our mission of reducing the impact on the global environment by increasing recycled content in new products while reducing the dependency on virgin material.”
Both firms will immediately begin the engineering and development of the facility, which involves the recycling of post-use polystyrene back to styrene monomer.
Toyo Styrene’s facility can process up to 10 tonnes of post-use polystyrene per day
The depolymerisation facility will hold the capacity to process up to 10 tonnes of post-use polystyrene per day.
Toyo Styrene will purify the styrene monomer oil generated from the technology into a purified styrene monomer applying an advanced purification technology.
According to Agilyx, Toyo Styrene facility is expected to be operational at the beginning of 2022.
Toyo Styrene president Sanshiro Matsushita said: “This is the very beginning for true circular economy society in Japan. We will enhance the chemical recycling for PS by making use of the characteristics that PS is relatively easier to be depolymerized to SM than other plastics.
“We will achieve that recycled “refreshed” PS is able to use for PS food containers with no problem with both quality and safety.”
In December 2019, Agilyx signed an agreement with General Electric (GE) to advance the circular economy for plastics.
The deal allowed to combine Agilyx’s deep domain experience in chemical recycling with GE’s experience in the application of industrial Artificial intelligence (AI).