Partnership: first shipment of renewable benzene leaves Ulsan harbour, South Korea

Düsseldorf, Germany — Covestro will focus on its sustainability drive at K 2022  in October, following up on its recently announced collaboration with two petrochemical companies, Finland’s Neste and South Korea’s SK Geocentric, to supply mass-balanced benzene for MDI production in China.   The company had already committed to making TDI from renewable raw materials, including biomass, bio waste and residual materials, allocated to products using a mass-balance approach. This, it claims, generates no net CO2 from production "cradle" to the factory gate.   It is gradually converting production sites to the ISCC Plus sustainability standard. This is already in place at Leverkusen, Dormagen and Krefeld-Uerdigen in Germany; Antwerp, Belgium and Shanghai, China. Covestro has signed contracts with energy suppliers including Ørsted, EnBW, ENGIE and Datang Wuzhong New Energy, among others to supply these sites with electricity from renewable sources.   Covestro and its partners have developed a chemical recycling process to recover polyol and the precursor to TDI from PU mattress foam, with results at the pilot plant in Leverkusen said to be promising. The partner companies now intend to extend the project to the industrial processing of flexible foams.   The company is also a co-ordinator of the Circular Foam project. This EU initiative includes 22 partners from nine countries, dedicated to the chemical reprocessing of rigid PU from building insulation and used refrigerators. The project aims to save up to 1 million metric tons of waste, and 2.9 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, annually in Europe by 2040.   "Covestro is taking a committed approach here: using various approaches, we can specifically recover the raw materials we need for the production of our plastics," said Hermann-Josef Dörholt, global head of Covestro’s performance materials segment. "In addition to the established mechanical recycling of polycarbonate and thermoplastic polyurethane, we are focusing primarily on chemical recycling for this purpose."

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