Neste has successfully commissioned its new upgrading facility for liquefied waste plastic (LWP) at its Porvoo refinery in Finland. This 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. With an annual capacity to process up to 150,000 tons of liquefied waste plastic, the facility is the world’s largest LWP upgrading facility, and processing will be gradually ramped up.
“The successful commissioning proves that we can process liquefied waste plastic at an industrial scale. This achievement demonstrates Neste’s capability to develop advanced technology, set safety standards, and create new supply chains for challenging new raw materials. We are proud of this achievement, and I want to express my sincere thanks to our partners and employees whose dedication has allowed us to turn this vision into a reality,” says Jori Sahlsten, Executive Vice President of Oil Products at Neste.
Neste has processed liquefied waste plastic (e.g. pyrolysis oil) since 2020. The construction of the new upgrading facility and its integration to the existing oil refinery began in 2023 and was completed at the end of 2025. Production ramp-up was commenced in 2026 and will advance gradually depending on market and legislation development.
The new facility allows Neste to close the quality gap between crude liquefied plastic waste and the high-quality drop-in raw materials required by the petrochemical industry. While mechanical recycling remains essential, it is often limited by the quality of the waste. Neste’s new facility is specifically 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 liquefied plastic waste. 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. However, the current European Commission’s calculation rules on 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 sake, we need to ensure the calculation rules are amended to include refineries in the context of the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation,” says Maiju Helin, Director of Polymers and Chemicals at Neste.
In the new upgrading facility, Neste processes liquefied waste plastic together with crude oil. A mass balance approach is applied to attribute the recycled raw materials used in the process to the recycled Neste RE™ product. With the use of recycled Neste RE, a reduction of over 70%* in virgin fossil resource consumption (abiotic depletion) and a reduction of over 35%* in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be achieved when plastic waste is chemically recycled instead of incinerated and then used to replace fossil feedstock in plastics manufacturing.
To advance the circularity of plastics, Neste, together with its partners Alterra and Technip Energies, also licenses liquefaction technology for chemical recycling of hard-to-recycle plastics.
*) Life Cycle Assessment on Environmental Impacts of Chemical recycling of waste plastic – Case Neste (October 2022).
Source: neste.com
