Das Unternehmen ARCUS und die Technologie
- The objective and company philosophy today is to recycle non-recyclable, contaminated plastic waste destined for incineration without secondary sorting or washing, thus making a significant contribution to closing the carbon and plastic cycle and conserving resources.
- ARCUS was founded in 2015 and has since steadily evolved from a greentech start-up to a scale-up and is now on the cusp of rolling out its proprietary technology
- Our technology belongs to the group of chemical recycling processes and is based on the basic principle of pyrolysis - i.e. a process under exclusion of oxygen and high temperatures (approx. 500°C) to gasify plastics and recover a pyrolysis oil from it by means of condensation. These oils can be reused in the (petro)chemical industry as basic building blocks for plastics production or other high-value applications.
- The ARCUS process is fully electrified and can therefore potentially (with the necessary infrastructure for competitive green power) be operated in a CO2 neutral manner.
- Chemical recycling is currently discussed in the public in partly contradictory ways
- ARCUS has developed, had approved, built and commissioned the first chemical recycling plant of this kind in Germany in the industrial park in Frankfurt Höchst in order to be able to hold discussions far away from laboratory facilities and simple calculations. On the one hand, to obtain reliable figures and values for an industrial plant, and on the other hand, to offer companies whose products are incinerated at the end of their life cycle the opportunity to validate the recyclability of a plant on an industrial scale.
- The plant and its products are fully licensed and have all the necessary certifications (BimSch, Entsorgungsfachbetrieb, REACH, ISCC+, RedCert2). Thus, the plant there is not an experimental facility, but can be fully used for industrial purposes.
- The nominal capacity of the plant is 4000t/a and currently we are working on optimizing the process more and more.
- First products (pyrolysis oils) have been successfully produced from plastic waste that cannot be mechanically recycled and delivered to our customers.
- ARCUS focuses on genuine mixed plastic waste currently destined for incineration. We assume that both sorting and mechanical recycling will become better and better in the future, and that ARCUS will thus focus on increasingly difficult material streams, as we are also increasingly focusing on very durable plastics that will be recycled in the coming years. Likewise, the large mass of plastic waste is not pure homogeneous fractions, but mixed and contains a wide variety of polymer types.
- Our technology is robustly designed and built to handle different polymer types >5% (e.g. PVC, PET, ABS, SAN and others). Of course, even ARCUS cannot recycle "everything", as there are technical and especially economic limits to what is feasible. Here ARCUS has a wide range of possibilities, which we are happy to discuss individually with our customers and partners in a direct exchange.
- In addition, ARCUS technology can recycle not only packaging but basically any form of plastic. Whether 2D material (e.g. films), 3D material, colored, black, colorless, mixed with additives, etc. is almost irrelevant.
