Meet the partner: Oscar Vernaez from Neste

Oscar Vernaez is the Research and Development Manager for Chemicals and Materials in Neste’s Innovation. 

Can you shortly introduce your role in the INCREACE project?

Neste is engaged in combating climate change and promoting the circular economy. We help the transportation sector and cities, customers in aviation and the polymer and chemical industries to make their operations more sustainable. My role is to coordinate our participation in INCREACE.

How did Neste get involved in the INCREACE project?

Neste joined the INCREACE project as an industrial partner in the consortium to develop ways to chemically recycle plastic components from Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and to introduce advanced recycling technologies to be considered in the project. We also had contact with some of the manufacturer partners that have expressed their interest to evaluate Neste’s approach as a possible solution to their circular value proposition.

How do you see the added value of INCREACE for Neste?

Our decades of experience in oil refining, combined with refining expertise in upgrading low-quality raw materials, provide a solid foundation for the rapid demonstration and scaling up of chemical recycling. Our target is to process over 1 million tons of waste plastic annually from 2030 onwards. To achieve this goal, we are considering all different streams of waste and the WEEE is one of the most challenging streams for chemical recycling. With INCREACE, Neste will pave the way to incorporate WEEE streams using its current chemical recycling technology, while providing circular solutions to the manufactures of electric and electronic devices to reemplace their raw materials with drop-in solutions that can be used on their own or in a blend to create products of identical quality to those made out of conventional raw materials based on virgin fossil oil.

What is the role of Neste in the INCREACE project?

INCREACE is another example of Neste collaboration with different partners in the plastics value chain to develop chemical recycling technologies and capacity. In INCREACE, Neste is studying the recyclability of WEEE streams through chemical recycling as an additional advanced recycling technology. Neste will apply liquefaction technologies to different pre-selected mixed plastic streams and evaluate the quality of the resulting products to correlate their properties with the properties of the streams. Additionally, Neste can support manufacturers in the use of raw materials from chemical recycling for the production of electronic devices, specially where drop-in virgin-like materials are needed, like in food contact and medical applications.

What do you hope to achieve by the end of the project?

Together with mechanical recycling and dissolution technologies, chemical recycling will contribute to  increasing the circularity of Electrical and Electronic devices. One clear objective is to improve the recycling yield of mixed plastics by chemical recycling, allowing Neste to consider WEEE streams to be added as part of our ambitious goal. That will improve the reliability and robustness of the advanced recycling technologies to enable processing of even more mixed waste plastic streams.

Furthermore, the results from Neste’s evaluation will be presented as guidelines to the other partners for Design-for-recycling and input for standardization bodies, industries and policy makers.

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