72 million tons of PET (the second most used plastic polymer) are produced each year from petroleum refining. The same year, 53 million tons of waste PET is landfilled, incinerated or floats into seas and oceans. Gr3n proposes a completely new way to break this vicious circle and create plastic from waste. The problem with PET is that it is currently “reused” and not “recycled”, as only transparent and pale bottles are mechanically treated to be partly added to virgin PET in the production of plastic bottles and trays. All other PET derived products, as waste polyester textiles and coloured plastics are almost worthless to the market and end up polluting the environment. Our vision is to enable the first truly circular approach to PET recycling, empowered by our patented technology able to break any kind of PET into its two main building blocks, for creating new PET plastics infinitely and cost-effectively. Through a 15,000 tons/year gr3n plant we do expect to collect, process and address the need of virgin plastics and polyester of a metropolitan area, thus triggering a true circular approach to plastic recycling. The cPET project is focused on validating the sustainability of creating a European distributed network of gr3n plants localized in each urban area, able to treat any PET-derived waste and produce new plastic for local consumption. This SME Instrument innovation project aims to tear down all the technical, economic, regulatory and logistics/organizational risks to scale up the initial 1,000 tons/year demonstrator to a full-fledged industrial plant. This will be achieved through a real demonstration is a small urban area, where a circular approach to PET recycling will be really tested, streamlining the logistics and measuring the economic, environmental and societal benefits before proceeding with a global commercialization strategy.

Based on an internationally patented technology, the project foresees to bring at industrial level (through a completely functional pilot plant) the usage of microwaves as Process Intensification approach (through an electromagnetic catalytical effect) of the well-known alkaline hydrolysis depolymerization reaction. Such reaction was, up to know, economically unfeasible due to a certain number of technological constraints that DEMETO finally solves. Coordinated by PROCESSI INNOVATIVI, R&D company of a large EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) group, but supported by a large basis of SMEs that will bring the most innovative aspects of the project technology, DEMETO's Consortium is composed by highly skilled members, which can guarantee the appropriate exploitation of the project business case, also thanks to the involvement of all the major commercial stakeholders of the PET value chain, including the most relevant Customer Segments. In fact, having followed all previous steps from lab-level testing (TRL3) to industrial demonstration of the core reactor (TRL6), we are now in the position to further move the technology towards its market deployment, by building a pilot plant (containing a full reactive unit) that would act as industrial demonstration of the performances of DEMETO's de-polymerization approach to the market. One of the project major strengths is in fact that the market is ready to accept DEMETO's technology. The existing value chain of post-consumer recovery of PET plastic waste is perfectly apt to accept the introduction of a new "ring of the chain", that would close the loop into a circular economy model, acting either at the end of the chain (mechanical recyclers) or at its beginning (PET producers). This gives us a total addressable market of about 60 plants in Europe (270 worldwide), for a value of around €1.2bn (€5.4bn worldwide).

Improvements of the overall sustainability of process industries from an economic, environmental and social point of view require the adoption of a new industrial symbiosis paradigm - the human-mimetic symbiosis - where critical resources (materials, energy, waste and by-products) are coordinated among multiple autonomous Production Units organized in industrial clusters. SYMBIOPTIMA will improve European process industry efficiency levels by: (a) developing a cross-sectorial energy & resource management platform for intra- and inter-cluster streams, characterized by a holistic model for the definition, life-cycle assessment and business management of a human-mimetic symbiotic cluster. The platform multi-layer architecture integrates process optimization and demand response strategies for the synergetic optimization of energy and resources within the sectors and across value chains. (b) Developing extensive, multi-disciplinary, modular and “plug&play” monitoring and elaboration of all relevant information flows of the symbiotic cluster. (c) Integrating all thermal energy sources, flows and sinks of the cluster into a systemic unified vision, as nodes of smart thermal energy grid. (d) Taking into account disruptive increase of cross-sectorial re-use for particularly impacting waste streams, proposing advanced WASTE2RESOURCE initiatives for PET. The development of such a holistic framework will pave the way for future cross-sectorial interactions and potentialities. Furthermore, the adoption of available LCSA and interoperability standards will grant easy upgradability of legacy devices and a large adoption by device producers. Modularity, extendibility and upgradability of all developed tools will improve scalability and make the SYMBIOPTIMA approach suitable both at small and large scale. Rapid transfer from lab-scale to testing at demonstration sites will be eased by the presence of industrial partners and end-users, as Bilfinger, Siemens, SXS, and Neo Group.