HydroPRS Chemical Recycling Process - Plastic Packaging Recycling Evaluation Plant

Mura's solution is chemical recycling process 'HydroPRS,’ already proven at pilot scale. The first commercial scale plant is due for operation in Q1 2023.  HydroPRS is designed to recycle residual waste plastics, particularly polyolefin film and multilayered flexible plastics that are currently down-cycled, sent to landfill or for energy recovery.   The process characteristics provide significant advantages over competing technologies. These characteristics align to the Alliance Prize goals (impactful, scalable, feasible, innovative), underpinning process scale up, build out, and importantly, creating global circular impact at the system scale.   These value propositions centre on the innovation of 'Supercritical Water' as the process environment:

• Scalable process: water provides direct heat contact with melted plastic
• Stable reaction environment through hydrogen donation: reduces excess cracking and formation of unwanted bi-products, avoids charring, delivering a high yield of c85% product
• Tolerant to contaminants: including food residues, card/paper, and wet feedstock
• Aligns to mixed polyolefin waste outputs from MRFs
• Scale and impact: delivered through multiples of 20 and 50kT plants, through a planned global buildout of over 12 plants, with c1mT capacity
• Sector-leading sustainability: lowest global warming potential for process and products, evidenced through academically independent LCAs; with strong potential for #NetZero

Our challenge is to understand the optimal processing for different packaging types, and waste plastic arisings from MRFs, to underpin the global scaling programme with the development of a pilot-scale evaluation plane based on the evolved HydroPRS design. This enables Mura to grow to global scale by:

• Evaluating packaging, for process-ability and product quality, in controlled conditions, working with brand partners;  
• Evaluating post MRF-residual waste streams, informing MRF processing to improve residuals quality;  
• Delivering sub-commercial scale process optimisation and feedstock assessments impossible in commercial scale plants; reducing risks to main plant operations.