By Kim Seung-yeon
ULSAN, Sept. 17 (Yonhap) — South Korea’s SK Group has begun the process of recycling plastics with a high-tech approach that involves extracting raw materials from used plastics or significantly altering their chemical structure. The second-largest conglomerate in the country is building the world’s first plastic recycling cluster with core chemical recycling facilities in Ulsan, an industrial city on the southeast coast.
The Advanced Recycling Cluster (ARC) is a 1.8 trillion-won (US$1.35 billion) project with a construction site that is 215,000 square meters in size, the equivalent of 22 football stadiums. It is scheduled to open in 2025.
“Some 320,000 tons of plastic waste — which is 213 million 500-milliliter PET bottles of water — will be recycled every year once the ARC is operational,” said Kim Ki-hyeon, an official at SK Geocentric Co., the chemical unit in charge of the ARC, during a press tour in Ulsan on Wednesday.
The recycling cluster will house three major chemical recycling facilities: high-purity polypropylene (PP) extraction, depolymerization of PET plastics or polyester, and pyrolysis. SK is working with Canada’s Loop Industries and U.S. Purecycle Technologies for the PP extraction and depolymerization processes, respectively, and has a license contract with British recycling company Plastic Energy for pyrolysis.
SK Innovation Co., SK’s energy unit, plans to use the pyrolysis oil as feedstock for its naphtha cracking by refining it using post-pyrolysis processing. According to SK Geocentric engineer Park Ji-hoon, chemical recycling has the advantage of being able to produce recycled PET in almost a virgin form, so there is no need for mixing or blending to enhance the product without any quality deterioration.
These chemical recycling processes will eventually help create a “circular economy” that turns waste into resources and offers a solution to problems associated with landfills and other waste disposals, SK said. Starting in 2026, dumping waste at metropolitan landfill sites will be banned in South Korea, and a ban on burying household waste in the ground will go into effect in 2030.
“We believe that recycling plastic waste that was supposed to be incinerated certainly contributes to a reduction in carbon emissions,” Kim said. SK said it is doing its own calculations on the carbon emission effects of chemical recycling, but it can reduce carbon emissions by more than 60 percent compared with incineration, citing the results of research by global chemical firm BASF.
SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said earlier that SK will aim to cut carbon emissions by 200 million tons, or 1 percent of the global target set by the International Energy Agency. “This is the beginning of SK moving away from its oil-oriented business structure that once symbolized the country’s rapid industrialization and presenting a model for future growth,” an SK official said.