Neste rachets up liquefied waste plastic capacity

Neste has successfully commissioned an upgrading facility for liquefied waste plastic (LWP) at its Porvoo refinery in Finland. It is claimed to be the world’s largest LWP upgrading facility with a processing capacity of up to 150 000 tonnes.

The EUR 111 million investment marks a major milestone in the scale-up of chemical recycling, enabling the production of high-quality feedstock for the plastics and chemicals industry.

‘The successful commissioning proves we can process LWP at an industrial scale,’ says Jori Sahlsten, evp of oil products at Neste. ‘This achievement demonstrates Neste’s capability to develop advanced technology, set safety standards and create new supply chains for challenging new raw materials.’

Challenging streams

Construction of the new facility and its integration to the existing oil refinery began in 2023 and was completed at the end of 2025. Production ramp-up started earlier this year. Neste has processed pyrolysis oil since 2020.

Neste says the new facility closes the quality gap between crude LWP and typical raw materials required by the petrochemical industry. The plant has been designed to process oils derived from challenging waste plastic streams such as multi-layer packaging, mixed plastic waste and contaminated plastics.

‘We enable the scale-up of chemical recycling by upgrading LWP,’ adds director of polymers and chemicals Maiju Helin. ‘The plastic originates from low-quality waste streams not suitable for mechanical recycling and destined for incineration or landfills. Thanks to our new facility, even hard-to-recycle plastic waste can be upgraded to meet the feedstock quality requirements of companies manufacturing high-quality plastics.’

Mass balance

But she cautions that the European Commission’s current rules for calculating recycled content in the Single Use Plastics Directive threaten to limit the ability of refineries to serve EU’s recycled content targets. ‘For Europe’s competitiveness, we need to ensure the calculation rules are amended to include refineries in the context of the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation.’

In the upgrading facility, Neste processes LWP with crude oil. A mass balance approach is applied to attribute the recycled raw materials used in the process to its recycled Neste RE product. When Neste RE is used to replace fossil feedstock in plastics manufacturing, a reduction of over 70% in virgin fossil resource consumption (abiotic depletion) and a reduction of over 35% in greenhouse gas emissions is achieved.

Neste is a leading producer of renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel with production in three continents. It also produces high-quality oil products at its Porvoo refinery in Finland.