Waste plastics

Neste focuses on efficient utilization of raw materials from waste and residue streams to reduce fossil oil dependency and related climate emissions, as well as to accelerate circularity. 

Liquefied waste plastic provides our traditional crude oil refineries and opportunity to replace crude oil use with more sustainable alternatives. Besides already producing over 3 million tons of renewable products from various bio-based raw materials annually at our renewables refineries, we are working towards replacing crude oil use with over 2 million tons of alternative renewable and recycled raw materials at our traditional oil refineries by 2030. Our aim is to have liquefied waste plastic to account for over 1 million tons of this annually.

We focus on post-consumer plastic waste, e.g. colored, multimaterial, multilayer packaging waste that currently cannot be recycled mechanically. This supports global efforts to reduce plastic waste, and provides the means to reduce crude oil dependency in the production of new plastics. By providing plastics waste a high-value outlet, a new life, Neste helps reduce the need to direct these material streams to landfills and incineration, while it also helps prevent littering of the environment. 

Successful processing runs with liquefied waste plastic

Neste successfully concluded its first series of processing runs with liquefied waste plastic at its refinery in Finland. In this first series, we processed altogether 800 tons of liquefied waste plastic. This equals the amount a small city in the EU generates* in a year. In the course of the trial runs, Neste has been able to upgrade liquefied waste plastic to drop-in solutions for plastic production and develop industrial scale capabilities to upgrade recycled feedstocks.

Neste aims to increase the volumes of liquefied waste plastic processing gradually to continue learning and developing the value chains and processing technologies. Further processing runs with increased volumes are ongoing. Our target is to process over 1 million tons of waste plastic annually from 2030 onwards. 

Neste has established several partnerships to develop recycling of plastic waste, particularly chemical recycling technologies and capacity. Our aim is to become a significant solution provider for chemical recycling.

Read more about how we are combating plastic pollution and developing chemical recycling of plastic waste.

*) Based on figures from Eurostat and assuming a city size of 50,000 people.