SEOUL– The CEO of SK Geocentric Co. has met with top executives of waste solutions companies in the United States and Canada to boost cooperation on a multi-million dollar project to build a plastic waste reprocessing plant in South Korea.
Na Kyung-soo met with CEO Daniel Solomita of Loop Industries, a Canadian plastic waste recycling firm in Quebec, last week, SK Geocentric said, without elaborating.
SK Geocentric, formerly SK Global Chemical, holds a 10 percent stake in Loop Industries.
Na also met with top executives of Brightmark and Purecycle Technologies Inc. — two plastic waste recycling companies in the U.S. — and discussed ways to deepen business cooperation, SK Geocentric said.
The back-to-back meetings are a follow-up to SK Geocentric’s plan unveiled in August to spend some 600 billion won (US$572.2 million) to build a plastic waste reprocessing plant in an area of 160,000 square meters of land in South Korea’s southern industrial city of Ulsan.
For the Ulsan plant, SK Geocentric will incorporate Loop Industries’ depolymerization and Brightmark’s proprietary pyrolysis technologies — chemical methods to recycle the plastic waste, rather than the mechanical way of crushing, washing and melting the materials.
SK Geocentric has agreed to set up a joint venture with Purecycle Technologies to build a plastic waste recycling plant in South Korea, though it said the specific site has yet to be announced.
Purecycle specializes in recycling polypropylene waste into ultra-pure polypropylene resin by removing containments, which can be re-used in various consumer goods, automotive and construction materials.
SK Geocentric has said it plans to invest 5 trillion won by 2025 to transform its business portfolio from petrochemicals to green products, aiming to expand the plastic waste recycling capacity to an annual 900,000 tons.
Source: Yonhap News Agency