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PureCycle Technology Continues to Advance

John Layman, PhD and Section Head Corporate R&D Materials Science at Procter & Gamble, talks about an exciting new method of recycling polypropylene.

John Layman, PhD and Section Head Corporate R&D Materials Science at Procter & Gamble.
John Layman, PhD and Section Head Corporate R&D Materials Science at Procter & Gamble.

Packaging World:
What prompted the development of this technology?


John Layman:

Around 2014 I was assigned the task of maximizing the amount of recycled plastic we use. When it comes to packaging, our biggest plastic is polyethylene, but company-wide we use more polypropylene than any other plastic partly because of our vast number of brands. At the time I got my assignment, I was looking at a goose egg next to recycled polypropylene, because there was just no good way.


Do I understand this was a seed fund project, the program within the P&G packaging department where a younger technologist with an idea can seek corporate funding and the assistance of a more experienced technologist as mentor?

Yes, we started with a very small budget and Research Fellow Ken McGuire was my mentor. We started slowly and kept succeeding milestone after milestone, until eventually we had an outside engineering firm do a CAPEX study that indicated we could support a viable business around what we were doing. Then we had to find the best way to bring the technology from our lab into the commercial marketplace. P&G is not vertically integrated when it comes to making resin, so making it ourselves was no option. Nor is it our core business to be a commercial recycler. And, we wanted to make a large impact in the recycling of PP. So our global business development group suggested we try something more along the lines of a venture capital model, which led us to Innventure. They’re in the business of commercializing disruptive technologies, so they knew how to take a brand new technology and scale it into a profitable business. We licensed them to found PureCycle around P&G’s IP estate. They built a pilot-scale facility at an old Dow Chemical site in Ironton, OH, and a commercial production facility is underway.


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