P2PC
Plastics to Precious Chemicals.

The P2PC project aspires to cope with the urgent issue of plastics waste management. The project targets the challenge of increasing plastic waste volumes and diversity on the one hand, as well as the establishment of circular material schemes instead of value destruction. The most important premise of P2PC is that by pyrolysis, plastic waste that is currently being burned or landfilled can be a source of diverse chemical building blocks, the so-called āprecious chemicalsā. Its target, in other words, is to turn plastic waste into value.
More concrete, instead of using waste plastic as energy source or cracking it down to elemental units (e.g., ethylene, syngas) P2PC targets the extraction of valuable molecules by soft cracking, separation and chemical modification. This approach is quite novel and implies fundamental research. This way, P2PC can be considered as the next step in Flandersā efforts to lead the global effort in tackling the challenge of waste plastics.
Plastics to Precious Chemicals (P2PC) is a VLAIO supported ICON research project and is situated in the category āSidestream Valorizationā.
Objectives
āThe overarching aim of this project is shortcutting the circle of plastics-to-chemicals, whereby carbon-carbon bonds are broken as much as needed, but as limited as possible, to retain their intrinsic value. Additionally, recognizing that environmental sustainability is not improved without actual future implementation, the innovative recycling system resulting from this project should yield an economically viable value chain. The final result will be a smart combination of feedstock selection, pyrolysis parameters, functionalization and downstream processing to convert plastics into precious chemicals.