OneSteel's $32m plan to turn plastic waste into crude oil

OneSteel is banking on new technology from a U.S. company, Agilyx, which is yet to list on a stockmarket but which boasts Sir Richard Branson as an investor.

Agilyx describes itself as ‘‘the first company in the world to effectively convert previously non-recyclable and low-value waste plastics into crude oil’’.

A preliminary environmental assessment lodged by OneSteel with the Department of Planning and Environment says its Sparke Street, Hexham, plant has operated since 2005.

It processes about 240,000 tonnes a year of metal, often in the form of car bodies and white goods.

About one-quarter of this material is left over as waste and sent to Sydney as landfill, and OneSteel says its new plant would cut this amount by 30per cent.

The proposed two-stage recycling plant would mechanically separate the waste material – or ‘‘shredder flock’’ – into steel, plastic, rubber and waste.

 The sorted plastic would then be fed into the Agilyx ‘‘pyrolysis’’ plant and turned into ‘‘high viscosity fuel oil’’.

 The plant would turn up to 16,000 tonnes of plastic into as much as 17 million litres of oil.

The OneSteel assessment says any waste gases would be ‘‘combusted through an environmental control device (not a flare) capable of meeting highly conservative emissions criteria’’.

Pyrolysis involves heating organic material to high temperatures without oxygen; it’s the process that turns coal into coke, or timber into activated charcoal.

The ‘‘Generation 6’’ technology that OneSteel is proposing to use is described as ‘‘the first continuous feed self-cleaning waste plastic processing system in the industry’’, returning ‘‘five times more energy than it uses in the production process’’.

Corporate records show the Oregon-based Agilyx was founded in 2004 and known until 2010 as Plas2Fuel.

 The Newcastle Herald was unable to obtain comment from OneSteel about the Hexham plant.

For more information: www.agilyx.com/