Polystyvert building two new plants in Greater Montreal area

An artist’s rendering of Polystyvert’s full-scale commercial plant to recycle polystyrene. Image Credit: Polystyvert

Montreal-based polystyrene (PS) recycler Polystyvert is investing $40 million to build its first full-scale commercial plant to produce recycled PS in Greater Montreal, and is also establishing a new pilot plant at its R&D centre located near that city.

The new commercial plant will recycle 9,000 tons of post-consumer and post-industrial PS waste annually, with a high degree of contamination, Polystyvert officials said – an amount equivalent to 15 per cent of all the PS buried in the province of Quebec each year. The company said the investment involves the participation of two blue-chip partners in the PS industry who will contribute to the financing of the plant. “The supply of raw materials is ensured, as well as the sale of recycled [PS],” they said.

“After several successful development phases, our technology has reached maturity [and] we can now recycle contaminated waste with no other outlet than landfill sites,” said Polystyvert president Nathalie Morin. “This plant is the first of many that can be built worldwide by replicating what will be done in Greater Montreal, thereby multiplying the economic and environmental benefits of the project. We are already witnessing significant interest from key industry players eager to acquire licenses, paving the way for rapid company growth through the cloning of our first full-scale plant.”

Meanwhile, the construction of a new $3-million pilot plant at Polystyvert’s R&D centre, located in the east of Montreal, has now commenced, the company said, “with the financial support of a renowned global partner,” and also marks the company’s expansion of its process and intellectual property to another styrenic plastic, ABS. “Our R&D team has made considerable progress in adapting the technology to [ABS], which is widely used in numerous applications in our daily lives,” Morin said. “The installation of the ABS pilot plant in the east of Montreal marks a pivotal development stage in a new era of recycling for this plastic, which is currently poorly recycled but indispensable in its use.”

Founded in 2011, Polystyvert has developed a low-carbon-footprint process to recycle PS based on a dissolution technology. Once dissolved, the process can mechanically and chemically separate contaminants and additives – including a wide range of hard-to-remove contaminants such as pigments and brominated flame-retardants – before finally separating the original polymer from the solvent. The end-product is then a cleaned polymer that can be used as new raw material resin again, to manufacture various categories of PS products, including food-grade applications.