With recycling plants closing, is plastic pyrolysis worth saving?

At the beginning of the decade, the plastics industry worldwide was on the defensive. The public became aware of the millions of metric tons of plastic waste polluting oceans and waterways and piling up in landfills every year. They demanded that companies do something about it.

The plastics industry’s waste management record had been poor. The recycling rate was a measly 9% in the US and not much higher anywhere else. Faced with its biggest challenge in a generation, the industry pledged to redouble its recycling efforts. 

It also promoted “advanced recycling,” also called chemical recycling, as a technological solution to the waste crisis. The term covers processes like depolymerization, which can create polymers of a quality unattainable with the sorting, shredding, and water-based washing involved in conventional, mechanical recycling.

The chemical recycling process deployed most widely has been pyrolysis, and dozens of plants were built or have been planned around the world. The role envisioned for pyrolysis was ambitious: take in millions of metric tons of mixed plastic waste that is too messy for mechanical recycling and transform this plastic into a feedstock for petrochemical plants to convert into brand-new resins.

More than half a decade later, pyrolysis hasn’t lived up to that promise. Production rates at pyrolysis plants are low—around 5% in some cases—and a small fraction of what would be acceptable for a petrochemical complex. Pyrolysis plants have shut down, projects have been canceled, and firms have gone bankrupt.

“If you are going to plastic-to-plastic recycling, or plastic recovery, then pretty much pyrolysis is heading towards a bit of a dead end,” says Marcian Lee, an analyst with the consulting firm Lux Research.

But a few firms are persisting with the technology, and they maintain ambitious expansion plans. By painstakingly fine-tuning their plants, they say they have learned to improve practices enough to make pyrolysis viable. Executives at these firms say they haven’t given up on the dream that pyrolysis could one day help society safely and effectively manage its plastic waste.

Pyrolysis: A challenging process

In pyrolysis, heat in the absence of oxygen breaks down long polymer chains into pyrolysis oil, a crude oil–like substance that is sold to refiners and petrochemical makers. The output of pyrolysis oil from pyrolysis units varies depending on the input and reaction conditions, but firms operating the plants often claim yields of around 70%. The rest is by-product gases—usually captured to heat the pyrolysis reactor—and char, which can be landfilled or used as a fuel or as a filler for concrete.

How plastic pyrolysis works

Pretreatment

The feedstock for pyrolysis plants is mostly waste polyethylene and polypropylene products, such as film, that are hard to recycle in a conventional mechanical process. Sorting weeds out plastics like polyethylene terephthalate and polyvinyl chloride, which create undesirable benzoic acid and hydrochloric acid by-products, respectively. The plastics are dried and shredded before they are loaded into the pyrolysis reactor.

Pyrolysis

The reaction conditions vary by design, but generally pyrolysis plants heat the waste plastics to between 350 °C and 700 °C in the absence of oxygen. The heat breaks carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds, thus creating many different aliphatic and aromatic molecules. Roughly 70% of the output is pyrolysis liquid and waxes. The balance is gases, which are used as fuel in the pyrolysis reactor, and char, which is landfilled or burned as fuel.

Upgrading

To make the output suitable as a feedstock for petrochemical facilities, adsorbents and hydroprocessing are applied to remove chlorine, nitrogen, and other pollutants. A hydrocracker or similar unit further breaks down large molecules.

Conversion

After it has been upgraded, the pyrolysis oil is blended with conventional naphtha and fed into an ethylene cracker to create basic petrochemicals such as ethylene and propylene. These are subsequently polymerized into new polyethylene and polypropylene, as well as other products.

Recent years have seen an increase in the number of pyrolysis projects around the world. According to Lux Research, enough pyrolysis plant capacity was operating globally at the end of 2025 to process about 850,000 metric tons (t) of plastic waste per year, more than double the amount in 2023.

Lux’s Lee points to an important qualifier, however. “This is installed capacity,” he says. “It doesn’t really mean that they’re operating at their full scale. And honestly, we don’t really know what the actual utilization rate is, but we expect it to be typically quite low.”

But some production numbers are publicly available. Lee points to ExxonMobil as probably the only firm that has made real progress ramping up pyrolysis oil production. The company’s Texas plant started up in 2022 and ran at around 50% of capacity over its first 2 years. On the other end of the spectrum is Pryme, which in May announced its intentions to shut down its plant, in the Netherlands. In 2025, the company processed only 1,023 t of product, despite annual capacity of 26,000 t.

Lee says Pryme is a “textbook example” of the difficulties facing pyrolysis plants. “We know that Pryme struggled with feedstock contamination,” he says. “They struggled with producing pyrolysis oil that is not on spec for their offtakers.”

This is a common difficulty. As it turns out, plastic pyrolysis plants aren’t magic cauldrons that can transform any old plastic waste into a petrochemical feedstock. 

Much like in mechanical recycling, the plastics must be carefully sorted before they are shredded and fed into the reactor. Plastics that contain only carbon and hydrogen—such as polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene—work best in the process. Operators must remove polyvinyl chloride because it forms hydrochloric acid (HCl), which damages equipment, as well as polyethylene terephthalate because it forms benzoic acid, which clogs pipes. 

Even with such sorting, the resulting pyrolysis oil can still contain too many impurities to use in a petrochemical plant, so it is hydrotreated to eliminate contaminants. The oil might also be run through a hydrocracker to further break down its molecular constituents and prepare it to be blended with the naphtha feedstock that many petrochemical plants use.

These fundamentals are critical to pyrolysis—and are more important than the regulatory policies that pyrolysis players often blame for their shortcomings, Lee says. “The first hurdle you have to overcome is to actually operate at your full capacity. Even if regulations are in place . . . it means nothing if your plant is not really producing the oil at the end of the day.”

A wave of US pyrolysis plant shutdowns

Over the past year, the US has furnished several examples of firms unable to clear that production hurdle. Three relatively new pyrolysis plants—operated by Brightmark, Freepoint Eco-Systems, and Braven Environmental—have shut down, representing half of the large plants operating in the country. 

Brightmark began construction of its facility in Ashley, Indiana, in 2019. The plant was designed with the capacity to process 100,000 t of plastic waste per year into industrial waxes and fuels such as diesel.

Construction didn’t go smoothly. In 2020, Brightmark CEO Bob Powell told C&EN that the $260 million plant was 80% complete and would begin operating in 2021. By April 2022, the company had produced only 2,000 t of product. Powell blamed a fire and delays related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nevertheless, Brightmark aspired to expand beyond Ashley. In 2021, it unveiled plans for a $680 million facility in Georgia, but the project failed to obtain financing because Brightmark hadn’t successfully demonstrated the Ashley plant.

The Brightmark affiliate operating the Ashley plant went bankrupt in 2025 after defaulting on $172 million in green bonds issued by the Indiana Finance Authority. The plant was running at only 5% of capacity, Brightmark’s restructuring officer wrote in the bankruptcy petition. With such a low utilization rate, the petition says, the plant couldn’t cover its $800,000 in weekly operating and capital costs. On top of those ongoing outlays, the facility needed $100 million in upgrades.

Brightmark managed to acquire the facility out of bankruptcy, but its second attempt at running it didn’t last long. In a July 2026 response to a compliance update order from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, plant manager Chris Hillary says, “Brightmark has temporarily suspended active plastics-to-fuel processing operations at the Ashley facility while the company conducts a comprehensive evaluation of its technology configuration, operational strategy, staffing model, and future development plans for the site.”

Tarrytown, New York–based Braven has also faced its share of challenges.

The firm appeared to have strong industry backing for its plastics recycling project in Zebulon, North Carolina. In 2020, Braven started up a demonstration facility with annual capacity to process 12,000 t of plastic waste. The next year, Chevron Phillips Chemical agreed to buy pyrolysis oil from the company.

Braven then announced plans for a larger plant in Texarkana, Texas, from which BASF agreed to buy the output. But Braven started to encounter trouble at the North Carolina plant. In 2022, state inspectors found brown stains on the ground, which indicated contamination, and a smoldering dumpster filled with char. Officials also learned that the plant had shipped hundreds of drums of hazardous waste to another location without authorization. A 2024 visit from state inspectors found violations such as dozens of tanks filled with oil residue and exposed to stormwater.

In a May 2025 email obtained by Inside Climate News, Braven vice president of engineering and construction Michael Bloss told state officials, “We have idled the plant for the foreseeable future and are not pursuing any activity that is not an immediate Environmental, Health, Safety or Compliance item.”

Earlier this year, Braven walked away from a deal to buy a site for its planned facility in Texarkana. Asked about its deal with Braven, BASF spokesperson Birgit Hellmann responds in an email that “BASF is pursuing alternative options for supplying our North American production sites with volumes of qualified pyrolysis oil.”

Freepoint followed a similar trajectory. In 2022. the company began building a facility in Hebron, Ohio, with the capacity to process 90,000 t per year of plastics. It reported its first sale, to Shell Chemicals, in April 2025.

In 2023, while the Ohio plant was under construction, Freepoint began planning a second unit—twice the size of its first—in Eloy, Arizona. Dow agreed the next year to purchase 65,000 t of annual output from the second plant.

The Hebron plant then started running into trouble with regulators. Last December, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency sent Freepoint a notice of violations that included visible particulate emissions likely due to a faulty oil absorber. It also determined that the plant wasn’t using a scrubber to control HCl emissions. This April, the Ohio EPA warned Freepoint that less than 70% of the unit’s recent output was pyrolysis oil, which meant it would need to be regulated as a waste combustion facility and face tougher emissions standards.

In June, Freepoint issued a statement that it was winding down operations to a “care-and-maintenance state while strategic options for the facility are evaluated.”

In response to an inquiry from C&EN, Dow spokesperson Helena Alonso writes in an e-mail that the company “does not disclose details regarding specific commercial arrangements, supplier evaluations, feedstock sourcing strategies, delivery volumes or offtake agreements.” 

Dow also notes that it continues to look at advanced recycling generally as a means of broadening the variety of plastics that can be recycled. “Pyrolysis is one of multiple advanced recycling technologies that Dow is exploring. Dow remains committed to maintaining a diversified portfolio of advanced recycling partners, technologies and feedstock sources to support future customer demand for circular products,” Alonso writes.

Marco J. Castaldi, chair of the chemical engineering department at the City College of New York, says the underlying process shouldn’t be blamed for failures in the chemical recycling of plastics. “It’s not the technology,” he says. “It’s all about the upstream and downstream supply chain and all about the economics.”

Castaldi points to the difficulties before and after plastics are introduced to the pyrolysis reactor, such as managing feedstocks and purifying pyrolysis oil in secondary processes, especially for smaller companies. “The big commonality is what I would classify as companies trying to do too much,” he says.

The companies that are still standing are avoiding those pitfalls, Castaldi says. For example, they are paying waste management companies that are willing to clean up waste plastics to tight specifications so that the pyrolysis companies can produce an output of consistent quality. “What I see as the big problem is on the front end: getting scale of waste contracts of the material they want at the price they can afford,” Castaldi says.

Strategies of the companies still sticking to pyrolysis

The few firms that are still operating pyrolysis plants in the US—ExxonMobil, Alterra, and Nexus Circular—say they have been honing important skills, such as acquiring the right feedstocks. These companies continue to work on pyrolysis plant expansions. And all are backed by powerful investors—or in the case of ExxonMobil, an expansive company itself—with a strong interest in making the technology work.

ExxonMobil is the largest US oil and chemical company and claims to also be the country’s largest chemical recycler. Since 2021, it has started up three pyrolysis units at its Baytown, Texas, refining and petrochemical complex; it now has a total of 110,000 t of annual plastics-processing capacity. The company plans to complete a fourth unit by year-end, which will bring its capacity to 200,000 t per year. ExxonMobil says it has processed about 70,000 t of waste since its first unit opened in 2022. 

Eloissa Wells, ExxonMobil’s circular products director, says the company’s integration is one difference between its approach and what others have attempted. ExxonMobil is able to turn its pyrolysis oil into fuel and chemicals in refining and chemical units right at the Baytown site, she says. “We’re doing an in situ pyrolysis approach that allows us to leverage the scale of our complex manufacturing site.”

Building several pyrolysis units in succession has also helped, Wells says. “Every time we start to engineer a new one, we take a look at some of the bottlenecks that we had with the previous one.”

And ExxonMobil casts a wide net for its raw materials. “We look across North America to find feedstocks that have been collected that meet our specifications that traditionally cannot be mechanically recycled at scale,” Wells says.

Plastics aren’t going straight from a consumer’s recycling bin into ExxonMobil’s plant. In a LinkedIn thread, Greg Janson, CEO of Triton Group, a recycling firm that supplies ExxonMobil, explains that firms like his buy bales of postconsumer plastic and put them through several upgrading steps before sending them to a pyrolysis plant. “Exxon is not buying bales of scrap. They are buying sorted, processed, regrind and repro,” or reprocessed plastics, he writes.

Still, Janson notes that quality standards for waste plastics destined for a pyrolysis plant are lower than they are for those that will be mechanically recycled. Companies that provide plastics for pyrolysis don’t need to pinpoint properties such as density and melt flow, which they do for recycled resins that will be melted and remolded into new products.

“Basically, it needs to be a clean olefin,” Janson says, referring to polyolefins such as polyethylene. A market for these materials devoid of property requirements doesn’t exist at scale for mechanical recycling—pyrolysis is the only option, he says.

Alterra, which has been running a pyrolysis plant in Akron, Ohio, since 2020, has a list of more than 100 qualified suppliers of plastic waste that it says can meet its specifications. “We make a quite intensive screening on the characteristics of the feedstock,” says Valerio Coppini, Alterra’s chief commercial officer. As part of this screening, the company runs the material through a pilot plant and analyzes the quality of the pyrolysis oil it yields.

“We never underestimate the complexity of what we are doing,” Coppini says. “Maybe a lot of disappointment in the industry has been created by companies that were promising actually more than they were ready to do at that time.”

One task that Coppini thinks pyrolysis plants shouldn’t take on is purification of pyrolysis oil. Building what he calls “a toy hydrotreater,” which would be smaller and less economical than hydrotreaters at large refineries, runs up expenses. A better approach is for refining and petrochemical customers to take care of that step or for the industry to establish centralized purification facilities. The oil companies Shell and Neste have done this in the Netherlands and in Finland, respectively.

Neste is one of Alterra’s equity owners, as are the major petrochemical makers LyondellBasell Industries and Chevron Phillips Chemical. In addition, Alterra has been collaborating with Neste and the engineering firm Technip Energies to license its technology to firms seeking to enter plastic pyrolysis.

One licensing customer is the low-carbon-fuel maker Abundia Global Impact Group, which wants to build a plastics pyrolysis plant in Baytown with 80,000 t per year of capacity. Alterra is also in negotiations to license technology for plants in Australia and Azerbaijan.

But Alterra has stumbled as well. Last year, Neste and the plastics compounding firm Ravago Manufacturing scrapped plans to build a plant in the Netherlands with Alterra’s technology. In 2023, Alterra signed a deal to license its technology for a massive, 192,000 metric-ton-per-year plant that Freepoint had proposed for the Gulf Coast, but Freepoint ultimately didn’t execute a license agreement and build a plant.

And last year, Alterra dropped its own plan to build a pyrolysis plant in Sugarloaf, Pennsylvania, that would have been four times as large as the Akron facility. The company cited problems securing a lease, though the plant also faced local opposition. Coppini says Alterra is still pursuing a second US plant.

A problem of too much, too fast

To Clint Thompson, chief commercial officer of Nexus Circular, the main reason companies have failed in pyrolysis is that they scaled up too quickly. “They ran small pilot plants and then they tried to jump to what was the biggest plant in the world. And you just technically can’t do that,” he says.

Thompson says Nexus has been proceeding more carefully. It started up its plant in Atlanta in 2019, which has gone through three iterations of its technology and now has 16,000 t per year of processing capacity. The company is now installing 12 production lines with the improved technology at a facility in McDonough, Georgia, that will add 192,000 t per year of overall capacity. The first two lines will start up by year-end; four more will open in 2027.

With the major new plant, Nexus’s feedstock acquisitions are bound to get more complicated. Thompson is unperturbed, claiming that 2.7 million–3.1 million t of usable waste plastic sit within a 240 km radius of the planned plant. He also expects many states to pass extended producer responsibility laws. Such laws will finance new recycling infrastructure that could capture more waste plastics Nexus can use as a feedstock.

Nexus has also attracted strong backing. After an initial investment in 2015, media and automotive parts conglomerate Cox Enterprises led a $150 million investment round in 2023 and became Nexus’s majority owner. Nexus also has supply contracts with LyondellBasell, Chevron Phillips, and Braskem for its first six new production lines in McDonough. And Chevron Phillips and Braskem own equity stakes in the company.

The cash and expertise of blue-chip investors is another advantage, Thompson says. Smaller companies don’t have the required financial resources or know-how to scale up a pyrolysis plant. “These projects are tailor-made for a large petrochemical company,” he says. “They typically have the resources to be able to carry a long development cycle.”

But Thompson admits that enthusiasm for recycling is flagging. And companies like Nexus, which aim to keep the hope of pyrolysis alive, must now rack up technical and economic accomplishments.

At the same time, the public is growing skeptical because of the technology’s failures and the market is losing interest because of diminishing public pressure and the expense.

“Three or four years ago, customer demand was really high,” Thompson says. “Consumer products companies were driving the market with voluntary commitments that were just way oversized.” Many of these firms have now quietly backed off those ambitions.

Petrochemical companies that have been supporting pyrolysis firms with offtake agreements and equity investments have also lost the interest they had a few years ago, when business was booming. “They’re not in a position now to take any risk,” Thompson says.

Pyrolysis is looking less and less like it will be a panacea for the plastic waste crisis. But more success by firms like Nexus and ExxonMobil could position the technology to be one remedy for a plastic waste problem that will require many solutions.