New (Micro) Wave of PET Recycling Technology Arrives

Schneider Electric partners with gr3n to scale the latter’s Microwave Assisted Depolymerization solution to broaden polyester circularity opportunities to include textiles.

The worlds of advanced recycling and automation combine in a partnership between globally recognized Schneider Electric and little-known gr3n, a PET chemical recycler innovator.

The inspired pairing results in the first open automation system for advanced plastic recycling. Startup gr3n created Microwave Assisted Depolymerization aka MADE. MADE breaks down PET into its chemical building block monomers of terephthalic acid (PTA) and monoethylene glycol (MEG).

These monomers can be recombined to create new PET pellets with virgin-like, food-grade quality for packaging and textiles.

Gr3n can potentially achieve bottle-to-textile, textile-to-textile, or even textile-to-bottle recycling, moving from a linear to a circular system.

In March 2024, gr3n successfully demonstrated MADE and the power of Schneider Electric’s open automation technology, EcoStruxure Automation Expert, at its site in Italy.

The MADE plant is the research-and-development precursor to the first industrial-scale facility. Plans are to build a production plant in Spain with a capacity to treat more than 40,000 ton/year of polyester waste.

That facility is a joint venture with gr3n shareholder Intecsa Industrial, whose commercial and new business units director Ramiro Prieto said in July, “gr3n has the potential to change the recycling industry, as their technology allows us to tackle things other technologies cannot.”

That same July release noted that post-consumer and/or post-industrial polyesters can be sourced from bottles that are “colored, colorless, transparent, or opaque”; textiles can be 100% polyester or blends of other materials of up to 30% cotton, polyether, or others.

Advantages of an open system.

The modularity of gr3n’s proprietary recycling process permits MADE to be the first plastic recycling plant to use shared automation runtime managed by Universal Automation, based on the IEC 61499 standard.

In simplest terms, the software-defined automation system decouples hardware from software, allowing devices and equipment to be freely connected across architecture layers, regardless of manufacturer. It acts as the digital backbone of industrial operations at the plant, providing the foundation to make more informed decisions.

This establishes a two-fold purpose: a technological demonstration of a new generation of automation systems, where the “intertwining between OT and IT enables the exploitation of advanced functionalities for operations management and data analytics,” according to the release. “

Through software-defined automation and hardware independence, we have been able to effectively de-risk our operations and push the boundaries of our technology,” says Fabio Silvestri, head of marketing and business development at gr3n. “

We’ve been able to reconfigure our systems quickly when we see opportunities to improve efficiency, while avoiding supply chain issues due the hardware agnostic nature of the system.

This is what is needed to make advanced plastic recycling at reality at scale.” In short, benefits from this arrangement are:

• Industrial scalability
• Design flexibility
• engineering and time-to-market reduction;
• control simplification;
• reduced costs;
• next-gen workforce attraction.

What this means for real-world recycling growth.

The partnership between gr3n and Schneider Electric started with the signature of a Memorandum of Understanding that enables the chemical recycler to scale operations to new sites quickly and cost-effectively.

The solution is expected to reach industrial scale by 2027 with the construction of an annual 35-40 kiloton plant that will include pre-treatment, depolymerization, and repolymerization.

“People produce around 460 million tons of plastic [yearly], approximately 70% of which are sent to landfills or mismanaged,” says Christophe de Maistre, president energy & chemicals, industrial automation, Schneider Electric.

“If we want to overcome the scale of plastic waste, there are certain non-negotiables. We must see integration across the whole product cycle, modularization to optimize and standardize engineering processes, as well as software defined automation solutions that deliver scalability, break silos and act as a gateway to advanced analytics.The project with gr3n demonstrates all these principles, improving flexibility, scalability and the efficiency of their solution and enabling them to grow to an industrial scale.”

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