Schneider Electric has partnered with GR3N, the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) chemical recycler to create an open automation system for the advanced plastic recycling industry.
GR3N developed MADE, the microwave-assisted depolymerization solution. This process breaks down PET into its chemical building blocks that can be recombined to create new PET pellets with virgin-like quality for packaging and textiles, effectively closing the loop for hard-to-recycle plastic. The technology is based on alkaline hydrolysis, and it can manage a relatively high amount of impurities.
In March, GR3N successfully demonstrated MADE and the power of Schneider Electric’s open automation technology, EcoStruxure Automation Expert, at its demonstration site in Italy. The MADE plant is expected to use of all the technologies that will be finally adopted for the first industrial-scale facility, foreseen to be installed in Spain and with an expected capacity of more than 40,000 tons/year of PET waste treated. The intrinsic modularity of GR3N’s proprietary recycling process has allowed MADE to be the first plastic recycling plant to use the shared automation runtime managed by Universal Automation, based on the IEC 61499 standard.
The software-defined automation system decouples hardware from software, allowing devices and equipment to be freely connected across architecture layers, regardless of manufacturer. It acts as the digital backbone of industrial operations at the plant, providing the foundation to make more informed decisions. This approach allows MADE to be a technological demonstration of a new generation of automation systems, where the intertwining between OT and IT enables the exploitation of advanced functionalities for operations management and data analytics.
“Through software-defined automation and hardware independence, we have been able to effectively de-risk our operations and push the boundaries of our technology,” said Fabio Silvestri, head of marketing and business development at GR3N. “We’ve been able to reconfigure our systems quickly when we see opportunities to improve efficiency, while avoiding supply-chain issues due to the hardware-agnostic nature of the system. This is what is needed to make advanced plastic recycling a reality at scale.”
Due to EcoStruxure Automation Expert’s modular, agnostic nature, GR3N was able to choose the optimal technology for the demonstration plant and easily scale to new sites.
The partnership between GR3N and Schneider Electric, which with the signature of a memorandum of understanding (MOU), will enable the chemical recycler to scale operations to new sites. The solution is expected to reach industrial scale by 2027 with the construction of a 35-40 kilotons per annum (kta) plant which will include the pre-treatment, depolymerization and repolymerization.
“Every year, people produce around 460 million tons of plastic, approximately 70% of which are sent to landfills or mismanaged,” said Christophe de Maistre, president, energy & chemicals, industrial automation, at Schneider Electric.
“If we want to overcome the scale of plastic waste, there are certain non-negotiables. We must see integration across the whole product cycle and modularization to optimize and standardize engineering processes, as well as software-defined automation solutions that deliver scalability, break siloes and act as a gateway to advanced analytics. This project with GR3N demonstrates all of these principles, improving flexibility, scalability and the efficiency of their solution and enabling them to grow to an industrial scale.”
