Agilyx Corp. (Agilyx; Tigard, Ore.; www.agilyx.com) announced the licensing of its technology to Toyo Styrene Co., LTD (Toyo Styrene), an affiliate of Denka Company Ltd. The site technology license agreement enables Toyo Styrene to deploy the Agilyx technology near Toyo Styrene’s facility in the Chiba Prefecture of Japan. The facility will focus on recycling post-use polystyrene back to styrene monomer.
“This announcement marks our formal entrance into the Asian markets to deliver circular pathways for plastics.” stated Joe Vaillancourt, CEO of Agilyx. “We are excited to be working with a group that shares our mission of reducing the impact on the global environment by increasing recycled content in new products while reducing the dependency on virgin material. Toyo Styrene has been a leader in developing eco-friendly products for the efficient use of plastics.”
“I am pleased with announcing the License Agreement with Agilyx which has the unique pyrolysis technology for used polystyrene into styrene monomer,” stated Sanshiro Matsushita, President of Toyo Styrene. “This is the very beginning for true circular economy society in Japan. We will enhance the chemical recycling for PS by making use of the characteristics that PS is relatively easier to be depolymerized to SM than other plastics. We will achieve that recycled “refreshed” PS is able to use for PS food containers with no problem with both quality and safety.”
Agilyx and Toyo Styrene will commence engineering and development of the facility immediately. The state-of-the-art depolymerization plant will have a processing capacity of up to 10 tons per day of post-use polystyrene. Toyo Styrene will purify the styrene monomer oil produced from the technology into a high purified styrene monomer using their proprietary purification technology. The manufacture of styrene through depolymerization of post-use polystyrene has a lower carbon footprint as compared to virgin styrene monomer. The facility is expected to commence operations in early in 2022. In the U.S., Agilyx is working with INEOS Styrolution to construct a polystyrene-recycling facility in Illinois. The companies began developing a unique chemical recycling process for polystyrene in 2017.
Agilyx is also working in a partnership with AmSty, a joint venture of Chevron Phillis Chemical and Trinseo focused on polystyrene recycling.