CPE Partners With Crossroads Real Estate For 10 New Advanced Recycling Facilities Across The UK

Clean Planet Energy have today announced a new joint venture with private equity firm Crossroads Real Estate, to fund Clean Planet Energy’s flagship ecoPlant currently under construction in Teesside, Northeast England. This will be the first of 10 new ecoPlants that Crossroads Real Estate and Clean Planet Energy are jointly seeking to build and operate across the UK.

The new joint venture, aiming to tackle the plastic waste crisis, could lead to over £400m of new UK investment deployed for the future construction of these facilities. Sites in Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire, Lancashire and South Wales have been identified to potentially lead the ten-site rollout, with further locations and announcements to be made in the months ahead.

A Clean Planet ecoPlant is a green, advanced recycling facility intended to process non-recyclable and hard-to-recycle waste plastics that would otherwise be sent to landfill. Each ecoPlant is designed to accept 20,000 tonnes of plastics each year and convert this waste into (a) ultra-low sulphur fuels to replace fossil-fuels in the transport and heavy-machinery sectors, and (b) circular petrochemical feedstocks, including Naphtha, which can be used to make new plastic products without requiring refineries to use fossil-based feedstock. Clean Planet’s ultra-low-sulphur diesel can have a 75% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to the use of traditional diesel, and the joint venture could lead to over 200,000 tonnes of hard-to-recycle waste plastics being repurposed into the circular supply-chain each year.

The news comes as COP27 is underway where world leaders seek solutions to reduce global GHG emissions and plastic pollution. Data from 2021 reports that the UK still generates in excess of 2 million tonnes of plastic waste each year, with well over 60% of this unable to be recycled; in November 2022 the UK government’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Committee published a report focusing on accelerating the reduction of plastic waste, with advanced recycling idenfitied as a key policy recommendation. By developing new ecoPlants throughout the UK, Clean Planet Energy and Crossroads Real Estate are opening a route for traditionally non-recyclable plastic waste to be repurposed into sustainable and circular products; thereby cutting plastic pollution, reducing waste entering UK landfills, and also lowering greenhouse gas emissions if used as low-carbon fuel replacements.

Earlier this year Clean Planet Energy announced a 10-year agreement with global energy company, bp plc, to offtake its circular products from its ecoPlants into the market. Each new ecoPlant will be able to process hard-to-recycle plastics in the UK; at their peak the facilities should create over 750 direct new jobs, and potentially thousands of indirect jobs when ecoPlants move from development into the construction and operation phase.