Lux has tracked the growth of advanced plastic recycling technology adoption through project announcements annually since 2022. In our 2025 update, we reflect on the developments of the previous year and what it means for 2025 and beyond.
The State of Advanced Plastic Recycling
The period between 2024 and 2025 was going to be a key inflection point for advanced plastic recycling technologies: Global installed capacity was projected to exceed 3 million tonne/y based on project announcements, with pyrolysis accounting for at least one-third of this capacity. However, there were some big hits and misses in 2024: Eastman completed a 110,000-tonne/y polyethylene terephthalate solvolysis plant, but others like Ioniqa, Agilyx (through Styrenyx), and New Hope Energy shut down their plants. Furthermore, 2025 did not start out great as BlueCycle and Brightmark’s pyrolysis subsidiary declared bankruptcy before the end of Q1. With the current economic headwinds and the recent commercialization setbacks observed, 2025 stands to be a year of broken promises. Over 50% of the projects scheduled for completion in 2025 are expected to miss their deadlines — especially those with six-figure-metric-ton/y capacities.
However, the overall outlook is not all doom and gloom. There will be more failures as uncompetitive technologies succumb to the invisible hand of modern economic theory, but it is just a natural progression of a maturing technology landscape. Ultimately, the successes have outweighed the failures, and the chemicals industry must be prepared to engage with the technologies as a developer, operator, or recycled output offtaker to stay relevant. Despite the multiple setbacks, global advanced plastic recycling capacity has continued to grow, and 2024 ended just shy of 1 million tonne/y of installed capacity. While the inflection point we expected to see by 2025 will be delayed by at least two years, 1 million tonne/y is still a significant milestone, and there is little question that advanced recycling technologies are here for the long run.
The ambiguity in how advanced plastic recycling is regulated will mostly be resolved in Europe within the next year or so. The U.K. has become the first nation to explicitly accept recycled content (through plastic pyrolysis) by mass balance to qualify for exemptions from its Plastic Packaging Tax, and the European Parliament has started to take a similar position — the discourse around chemical recycling has shifted from limiting the technology to living with it. A favorable regulatory environment will be critical for the technologies to flourish. The demand for premium, high-quality recycled plastics is still mostly a regulatory-driven market.
Advanced Plastic Technology Investments
In an increasingly crowded technology landscape, technology adopters and investors should favor robust and output-selective technologies that enable direct plastic-to-plastic recycling from low-cost (i.e., contaminated) feedstocks for more attractive plant economics that can better compete with low virgin plastic prices. Although the early generation technology developers currently lead in installed capacity, they risk going down the same path as APK and Ioniqa if they don’t continually innovate to address the challenges of high contamination in postconsumer feedstocks, high operational costs, and lower-than-expected output yields. The waste supply chain is probably the most critical piece of the puzzle for all advanced plastic recycling technologies, and interested parties should be prepared to invest heavily (at least in the two-digit-millions-of-dollars range) to support the waste supply chain, like ExxonMobil did through Cyclyx, to replicate ExxonMobil’s success with pyrolysis scale-up.
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