Success Story No. 9: The MMAtwo Project
Plastic Waste Gets a Second Life Through Innovative Processes
Context
Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) is a synthetic polymer commonly known as acrylic, widely used as a lightweight and shatter-resistant alternative to glass. Being lightweight, versatile, and cost-effective, yearly, there are over 300,000 tons of PMMA produced in Europe, and only 10% gets recycled. One of the biggest challenges for the European chemical sector when recycling PMMA is that it relies mainly on conventional processes that are not suitable for handling lower-quality or end-of-life (EoL) PMMA, often leading to it being incinerated or landfilled.
MMAtwo – a SPIRE Project
“Depolymerisation” might not be the most compelling or memorable word when discussing plastic and other environmental issues, but it is a compelling solution to an urgent problem.
A project almost unanimously recognised as a success story, MMAtwo (full title Second generation Methyl MethAcrylate) kicked off on 1 October 2018. Funded under a 2018 call of SPIRE cPPP, the project proposed a new and innovative recycling process to turn post-industrial and EoL PMMA waste into second generation Methyl Methacrylate (MMA) raw materials by using thermal depolymerisation. The process turns PMMA back into its monomer saving precious resources and CO2 emissions.
The MMAtwo team was committed to further developing the technology and bringing it to a commercial scale; the technology developed during MMAtwo was implemented in a demonstrator built on the premises of Trinseo in Rho, Italy and inaugurated in June 2024.
Approach, Implementation and Potential Impact
MMAtwo was implemented by a consortium of 16 European partners, including seven Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs).
It designed a model of circular economy, developing a new value chain for PMMA waste and a new technology to process different types of PMMA waste while saving up to 70% CO2 and notable amounts of water. The whole value chain is in the European Union (source).
The project ended in the fall of 2022, after four years and six trial campaigns, showing promising progress towards its objectives and expected impacts.
The Coordinator’s Angle
From a scientific perspective, the project technical coordinator of MMAtwo, Jean-Luc Dubois, stresses that what makes the project a success story is the unprecedently high purity of the regenerated monomer: “The project succeeded in developing a technology that depolymerizes PMMA into its monomer with a purity above 99.8 %.” Additionally, he explained that: “One of the key challenges in recycling projects is to secure the supply of waste to have enough material to justify and build a plant.” The MMAtwo team has “been able to identify more than 30,000 tonnes per year of new PMMA scraps that are suitable for depolymerisation”, he continued.
On a societal level, MMAtwo focused on communicating and raising awareness about the importance of recycling plastic materials, a modern environmental pain point. The challenges in terms of visibility and communication brought by the global COVID-19 pandemic were tackled through webinars and online workshops. MMAtwo “attracted a lot of attention”, concludes Jean-Luc Dubois. The vision and work behind the results of MMAtwo and the collaboration within the consortium were recognised through several awards, among which Innovation Team Best Practices 2023 at Sorbonne University. In April 2024, MMAtwo was selected “Project of the Month” by the CORDIS platform.
A.SPIRE is proud to have this inspiring project in the SPIRE portfolio, with ongoing results continuing after its completion. We look forward to seeing the progress of the demonstrator in Italy and to witnessing this groundbreaking innovation move one step closer to market deployment. This project marks an important step towards creating a truly circular model for an indispensable material - PMMA - and helps bring the European energy-intensive industries closer to the vision set out in the P4Planet SRIA 2050.
Check out this document for more information about the September Success Story.
Visit the MMAtwo website.
For more information about A.SPIRE, the Processes4Planet Partnership, and the Success Stories campaign contact the team.
