LARS

LARS is a project that is receiving funding from the EU Innovation Fund. The corresponding funding agreement was recently signed. In this large-scale, integrated processing and recycling plant, unsorted plastic waste will be converted into pyrolysis oil on an industrial scale for the first time.

The European Commission is supporting the project with €50 million from the EU Innovation Fund. The LARS project applied for funding under EU-IF 2023 call for proposals and will save around 1.75 million tons of CO₂ in its first ten years of operation.

Objective

The goal of the LARS project is to build a large-scale, integrated pre-treatment and chemical recycling plant in Europe to convert post-consumer plastic waste into pyrolysis oil, a sustainable substitute of naphtha, a fossil-based feedstock utilized as raw material in the plastic industry, and by doing so contribute to the development of a new circular business model. The pre-treatment plant will serve to prepare the plastic waste feedstock, which is then processed into pyrolysis oil in a chemical recycling plant using a patented technology. The new plant will be able to pre-treat up to 100 kilotonnes per year (kt/yr) of mixed plastic waste and produce more than 40 kt/yr of pyrolysis oil, which is used for the production of circular polymers with virgin-like quality, achieving a relative greenhouse gas emission reduction of more than 115%, compared to the reference scenario.

The LARS plant will combine a mixed plastic waste feedstock pre-treatment unit and a pyrolysis unit in one integrated industrial process, achieving a reduction of 1.75 Mt CO2eq emissions in the first 10 years of operation. The pre-treatment plant will serve to prepare the plastic waste feedstock, which is then processed into pyrolysis oil in a chemical recycling plant using a patented technology. This integrated concept has never been realised on such large scale. The chosen technology, chemical recycling, not only allows effective recovery of valuable raw materials from plastic wastes, but it also enables its valorisation to new products, as such aligning with the ambitious Packaging and Waste Packaging Regulation standards. 

By combining these two processes, the project will also contribute to meet the new EU regulatory requirements for packaging, which mandate the minimum recycled content in plastic packaging (between 10 and 35 % by 2030). Specifically, the project targets "Contact Sensitive non-PET packaging", for which current mechanical recycling technologies are insufficient to meet the regulatory targets.