The US-based recycling technology firm said the partnership follows more than a year of evaluation and the companies’ desire to expand their energy transition and circular economy offerings.

Leveraging the expertise of both companies, the aim is to create a new path to produce styrene via post-use PS products. The purification process that will be developed will bolt on to Agilyx’s existing depolymerization technology, accelerating the availability of both recycled styrene and recycled PS on the market.

Although manufactured from post-use PS, the recycled styrene is expected to retain all the properties and functionality of styrene made from the traditional, fossil-based route.

"We view this collaboration as an important step to meet the increasing demand for recycled content in plastic products. Demand for recycled content is increasing globally driven by legislation as well as sustainability goals by major brand owners,” said Agilyx CEO Joe Vaillancourt.

Creation of Cyclyx announced

Separately, Agilyx has announced the launch of a new subsidiary, Cyclyx International. The overarching goal of Cyclyx, Agilyx said, is to dramatically increase the recyclability of post-use plastics with a priority for fully circular pathways as well as assisting in the development of new supply chains that will aggregate and preprocess larger volumes of post-use plastics than current systems can support.

Over the past 16 years, Agilyx has developed what it regards as the industry’s largest database and predictive analytics around the chemical complexity embedded in waste plastics. Vaillancourt said the company found that the data generated can be used as a key tool to greatly expand and accelerate the recycling of post-use plastics.

“We initially developed Cyclyx to help source plastic feedstocks appropriate for facilities we are currently developing on three different continents,” he explained.” We quickly discovered that our process was greatly needed by others in the advanced recycling as well as mechanical recycling industries. As a result, we have created Cyclyx so that Agilyx and many other companies can work together to help bridge that gap."

Last year, Agilyx partnered with General Electric to develop artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and predictive modeling as well as optimization tools that use its data and domain knowledge to increase plastic recycling rates and create new recycling pathways.

Cyclyx is currently establishing partnerships with companies in diverse sectors, including petrochemicals, waste and recycling and retail, along with brand owners and municipalities.

GE Licensing’s president and CEO Pat Patnode commented:  “As we take on new datasets and challenges with new consortium partners, the AI team at GE Research will be able to build more robust AI, ML and predictive modeling and analytics tools that not only expand in industry applications but also lead to further improvements in recycling solutions.”