L’Oréal, Total and LanzaTech premier carbon-captured packaging in recycling world-first

29 Oct 2020 --- L’Oréal is partnering with energy giant Total and carbon recycling company LanzaTech to create cosmetics plastic packaging from captured and recycled carbon emissions, which it plans to fully commercialize by 2025.

The French personal care giant claims this could be the start of more efficient packaging production methods industry-wide. 

“As a major innovation for more responsible and sustainable packaging, this recycling process will be available to other companies who would like to work with us to reduce the environmental impact of their packaging,” Polina Huard, corporate media relations director for L’Oréal, tells PackagingInsights. 

The potential reduction in plastic waste or carbon emissions is unknown, but L’Oréal hopes the project will be a significant catalyst for its sustainability goals. 

“Our ambition is to industrialize this technology for 2024, before commercializing in 2025. It is too soon to know exactly the quantities it will impact. Still, it will definitely contribute to our objective of having 100 percent recycled plastic or bio-sourced plastic in 2030,” Huard continues. 

“Carbon recycling at its purest”
Carbon emissions are captured and converted into plastic in a three-step process. 

Carbon emissions are captured from steel mills and converted into recyclable plastic.Firstly, LanzaTech captures emissions from industrial sites and uses a fermentation process to create ethanol. 

“We have commercialized a biological gas fermentation platform that produces fuels and chemicals from industrial waste gases. Gas fermentation, a form of carbon capture and utilization (CCU), employs microbes that live on the carbon from gases rather than sugars,” explains Freya Burton, chief sustainability and people officer at LanzaTech.

The carbon monoxide in steel mill emissions, for example, is an unavoidable byproduct of steelmaking chemistry and inevitably combusted and released as atmospheric CO2, says Burton. 

“Similar to yeast fermenting sugar to make alcohol, LanzaTech uses a microbe – or a biocatalyst – to ferment waste carbon to make alcohol. The gases are captured from the flue stacks at industrial sites and fed to a bioreactor where the fermentation takes place.”

Total then uses a dehydration process jointly developed with IFP Axens, a French petrochemical company, and converts the ethanol into ethylene. This is then polymerized into polyethylene (PE), which has the same technical characteristics as its fossil counterpart and is widely recyclable.

“This is carbon recycling at its purest: taking carbon emissions that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere as CO2 and recycling it into a new product,” adds Burton.

“By capturing the gas prior to release and converting it into an essential building block, ethanol, we are recycling to get twice the use of the carbon that we would otherwise normally get.”L’Oréal claims the project could be the start of more efficient packaging production methods industry-wide.

Expanding use of carbon recycling
L’Oréal says the partnership is exploring ways to expand its technology in the future. “Now that the proof of concept has been successfully demonstrated, we also plan to study other carbon emissions as a second step,” says Huard. 

“Indeed, the technology is quite compatible with the waste fermentation from the wood industry or the recycling of household waste, for example. LanzaTech has already demonstrated the production of ethanol using household and agricultural waste around the world.”

LanzaTech says its plans to expand emissions sources are underway. “As steel mills transition to new production approaches, there are other waste and residue streams that can be recycled into ethanol to produce packaging materials, which is more similar to conventional chemical recycling,” explains Burton. 

“The next steps involve building the supply chain and supply of ethanol for conversion. LanzaTech’s technology is being commercialized around the world through licensing to companies that will build, own, and operate gas fermentation facilities.”

Steel emissions recycling
While looking for new streams of recyclable waste, the company plans to expand its use of steel emissions.

LÓréal, Total and LanzaTech are creating cosmetics plastic packaging from recycled carbon emissions.“The first commercial plant started up in China in May 2018 and has already produced over 16 million gallons of fuel-grade ethanol from steel mill emissions, with an additional steel mill facility and a ferroalloy plant in engineering,” continues Burton.

“ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel manufacturer, is building a 21 million gallon per year plant at their flagship steel mill in Belgium, with plans to roll out across Europe.”

“A world where all goods come from recycled carbon”
The methods can be used to create more than plastic, says LanzaTech. “Besides creating plastic, the technology could be used in the future for other applications. This can be used for the food industry,” says Burton. 

“The ethanol is the same as conventional ethanol from a chemical standpoint. A LanzaTech facility also converts spent bacterial biomass that is no longer performing the fermentation into a protein-rich animal feed.”

These processes can potentially be applied across industries, furthering the circular economy.

“Important chemicals such as acetone and isopropanol can be made directly from the same waste gas streams. This means we can create a world where all of the goods we use can come from recycled carbon,” concludes Burton. 

By Louis Gore-Langton