Oil and gas giant TotalEnergies announced it will build a second plastic recycling unit at its Grandpuits refinery, which it is converting into a zero-crude platform. The new recycling facility will focus on mechanical recycling, targeting the high-performance packaging market, in particular for pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. It will have a capacity of 30,000 tons a year and is expected to become operational in 2026.
Located southeast of Paris in Seine-et-Marne, the Grandpuits site operated as an oil refinery until February 2021 and, as part of an over €500 million investment, is being fully repurposed into a zero-crude platform focused on four new industrial activities. These include the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), biomethane production, plastics recycling, and the operation of two photovoltaic solar power plants.
TotalEnergies and Plastic Energy are already building a chemical recycling plant on the site, based on the pyrolysis technology developed by Plastic Energy. It will have a capacity to handle 15,000 tons of waste per year and is scheduled to be operational in 2024. The pyrolysis oil will be used as feedstock to produce polymers with identical properties to virgin polymers, according to TotalEnergies. This March, the France-based company signed a commercial agreement with Paprec to secure the supply of flexible packaging and film waste for the future plant.
The newly announced mechanical recycling facility will produce compounds containing up to 50% recycled plastic. It is expected to contribute to TotalEnergies goal of reaching 1 million tons of circular polymers by 2030.
Grandpuits transformation is mainly aimed at the aviation sector. The converted biorefinery is expected to have a processing capacity of 400,000 metric tons/year, producing 210,000 metric tons/year of SAF, which will be extended to 285,000 metric tons/year from 2027. It is also expected to produce 50,000 metric tons/year of renewable diesel and 70,000 metric tons/year of renewable naphtha.