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Consumer goods company P&G and PureCycle Technologies will open a plant that will restore used polypropylene (PP) plastic to 'virgin-like' quality with a recycling method that the consumer giants company calls “one of a kind.” The patented technology was created in P&G labs and then P&G licensed the technology to PureCycle.

Founded in 2015, PureCycle is opening the feedstock evaluation unit in Lawrence County, Oh. where they will calibrate the PP recycling process. The feedstock evaluation unit will begin operating in January 2018 and continue operations after the full-scale plant opens in 2020. While this is a P&G-developed technology, the recycled PP will be widely available for purchase across industries. According to PureCycle’s website, the proprietary process removes color, odor and other contaminants, which produces a 100% virgin-like PP material from recycled feedstock.

"Our approach to innovation not only includes products and packaging, but technologies that allow us and others to have a positive impact on our environment. This technology, which can remove virtually all contaminants and colors from used plastic, has the capacity to revolutionize the plastics recycling industry by enabling P&G and companies around the world to tap into sources of recycled plastics that deliver nearly identical performance and properties as virgin materials in a broad range of applications," says Kathy Fish, P&G's Chief Technology Officer.

"In the U.S. alone, the demand for virgin-quality recycled PP is immense. The Association of Plastics Recyclers (APR) has identified 1 billion pounds of recycled PP demand in North American alone. 720 million pounds of that demand is for 'high-quality' recycled PP," says Steve Alexander, CEO of the APR.

I’ve been to Resource Recycling’s Plastics Recycling Conference two years in a row and both times, speakers including P&G, have talked about the need for more recycled PP. So this will be one to follow closely on any new developments.