“We began the year with roughly half of our feedstock needs secured for phase 1 of the project, and with these important additional agreements in place we are moving closer to the more than 80 percent we expect to secure by year-end,” said Brad Lich, executive vice president and chief commercial officer. “This strong progress is a testament to the complementary nature of Eastman’s innovative molecular recycling technology to the current mechanical technologies in the market and to the growing need to enable circularity for more waste streams going back to high-quality contact-sensitive output.”
Citeo, the leading Producer Responsible Organization (PRO) in France, recently announced that Eastman, in a commercial partnership with Paprec, France’s leading integrated waste management company, has been selected to receive a significant amount of feedstock for the methanolysis facility in Normandy. The Citeo agreement to secure French household waste has provided Eastman with a strong foundation for securing French-sourced waste for its project in France.
Eastman also shared it has reached an additional agreement with Interzero, an innovation leader in plastics recycling with the largest sorting capacity in Europe, for an additional 25,000 metric tonnes of waste in addition to the 20,000 metric tonnes from a previous agreement announced last year.
“We're pleased to grow our initial agreement with Eastman and do even more to solve the waste crisis we're facing,” said Jacco de Haas, chief commercial officer of Interzero Plastics Recycling. “Chemical recycling is a necessary complement to mechanical recycling to keep more raw materials in the loop. Interzero and Eastman are committed to creating material circularity and Eastman’s facility in France will process colored and opaque PET waste that cannot be recycled mechanically.”
Another agreement with a leading company in the waste management and recycling eco-system was reached at the end of last year. This agreement, adding approximately 30,000 metric tonnes of waste, allows geographic coverage in strategic waste supplies.
Eastman recently shared the decision to build the facility in two phases which will allow the facility to recycle over 200,000 metric tonnes of hard-to-recycle polyester waste annually, most of which is currently landfilled or incinerated today. Due to the updated plans, the company now expects phase 1 of the project to be mechanically complete in 2026 and process 100,000 metric tonnes.
