PureCycle to go on $2 billion building spree

The polypropylene recycling firm PureCycle has achieved commercial-scale production at its plant in Ironton, Ohio, and raised $300 million in new capital from investors. Now executives say they are launching a $2 billion global expansion to establish plants on three continents by the end of the decade.

PureCycle’s technology, originally licensed from Procter & Gamble, uses a supercritical-butane-based solvent to dissolve postconsumer polypropylene products like film, auto parts, and containers and purify the polymer to levels nearly matching virgin material.

The company completed the Ohio plant in 2023 but hit operating difficulties on start-up that it now says it is resolving. In its most recent earnings announcement, the firm reported that the plant ran nearly 90% of the time during the first quarter, in which it also generated $1.4 million in revenue, the first revenues in the company’s history.

PureCycle CEO Dustin Olson compares starting up new technologies to coming home to a dark house. “You wander around that dark room until you find the light switch, and before you find the light switch, you’re stubbing your toe and tripping and knocking over dishes, but you find the light switch and all of a sudden you realize exactly what you need to do,” he says. “Well, we just flipped the light switches on, and we’re ready to go.”

The company says it will incorporate lessons from the Ironton start-up in the new facilities. The first is planned for Rayong, Thailand, on the site of IRPC, a refining and petrochemical affiliate of the Thai energy conglomerate PTT. The plant is set to have about 60,000 metric tons (t) per year of capacity and start up in the third quarter of 2027.

The Thai plant will cost about half of what the Ironton facility cost to build per unit of output, largely because it will be able to tap into existing infrastructure at the site. “We don’t have to build utilities; we don’t have to build flares; we don’t have to build roads or sewers or water or fire water. It’s all there,” Olson says.

PureCycle is also moving forward on projects it has long considered. It plans to build a plant, also with 60,000 t of capacity, in Antwerp, Belgium, by the end of 2028. One intended for Augusta, Georgia, by 2029 would have about 140,000 t of capacity. Longer term, the company is considering a second 140,000 t plant that could be located at one of the three other sites or in Japan, Olson says.

In all, PureCycle aims by the end of the decade to have about 450,000 t per year of capacity, which it predicts will generate earnings before taxes of $600 million annually.

Plastics recycling firms have struggled lately. A Brightmark pyrolysis plant in Indiana recently declared bankruptcy. Earlier this month, Braskem announced its intention to divest from a recycling venture in the Netherlands.

But Olson sees long-term drivers that favor recycled polymer content, such as European regulations that are expected to hit around the end of the decade. “This is why we believe it’s time to lean in, not lean back,” he says.

The sentiment echoes a recent report on chemical recycling of plastics from the consulting firm Bain & Company, which advises plastics firms to invest in chemical recycling now so they can be ready for the market when it blossoms. The report praises Eastman Chemical, which, like PureCycle, is placing big bets on recycling, in its case on a polyethylene terephthalate depolymerization process.

“The question for plastics producers is no longer whether chemical recycling will scale. It’s who will own the critical positions in the value chain when it does,” the report says.