The company will be led by Ralf Schöpwinkel, who joins from Geminor with 25 years of industry experience. Schöpwinkel leaves the position of CSO at Geminor, the resource management company he helped to establish in nine European countries. Schöpwinkel will remain a shareholder in Geminor.
Polynate will focus on plastic waste and its main activity will be to supply Quantafuel’s current facilities in Kristiansund, Norway (mechanical plastic recycling), Skive, Denmark (chemical plastic recycling) and its planned facilities in Denmark and the UK. Polynate will also supply plastic waste to Quantafuel’s joint project with Eurazeo – ReSource, Denmark’s largest plastic sorting facility in Esbjerg, which will be ready to receive waste from the beginning of 2024. Polynate will also enter the UK market, where Quantafuel has an ambitious project plan with several Plastic-to-Liquid (PtL) plants in the coming years.
“Polynate will make an important contribution to the sustainable treatment and management of international plastic waste,” says Geminor CEO Kjetil Vikingstad.
“The establishment of Polynate together with Quantafuel is strategically important for Geminor. We want to increase our market share and secure new downstream solutions for plastics. It is becoming increasingly important to sort plastics from residual waste, both to secure more raw materials for new plastic products and to reduce the fossil content in waste sent for energy recovery,” says Vikingstad.
“We see great potential here. Chemical recycling of plastics complements mechanical recycling and significantly increases the overall recycling rate. Chemical recycling will make it easier for many countries to achieve their ambitious recycling targets. I am very excited and look forward to focusing exclusively on plastics and supporting the industrialisation of Quantafuel,” says Schöpwinkel.
Quantafuel’s core business is chemical recycling, which involves using a pyrolysis process to break down plastic waste into its original building blocks of carbon and hydrogen chains. These are then reassembled into an oil that can be used to make new, high-quality products – such as food packaging – that meet the stringent requirements of the EU and the rest of Europe.
