Helping OEM Scale to Success
Automation technologies to help decrease costs, deliver efficiency, and accelerate pilot projects.
Recycling technologies, including depolymerization and solvent dissolution, can turn sorted plastic trash into feedstocks or pellets equal to virgin-quality material. Pyrolysis techniques can create feedstocks and liquid fuels from mixed trash. Emerson provides advanced instrumentation and other technologies to monitor and control critical processes, supporting efficient and sustainable operations.
Any product that uses plastic waste as its basic feedstock must be concerned about keeping its supply at some minimum level of contamination, and/or have a process that rejects undesirable elements as a normal step. Effective waste sorting is a major element, but digital tools connected to the process control system and its instrumentation can detect when conditions are moving out of normal ranges, often caused by feedstock contamination, before it also contaminates the final product. These digital technologies help maintain consistent operation and final quality.
Real-Time Monitoring System™ (RTMS)
Real-Time Modeling System™ offers real-time feedstock modeling to refine process conditions to optimize production.
Control Systems and Software for the Chemical Industry
Embedded advanced control offers steady asset control and maintains consistent operations to ultimately impact product quality.
Industrial Edge Software & Solutions
Visibility to process data offers real-time analytics (and real-time action), Edge device seamlessly integrates with DCS and DeltaV™.
Fisher FIELDVUE Digital Valve Controllers (DVC)
High position controls ensure accuracy of process set points with a digital valve controller device.
While plastic recycling processes are very different, they have one common element: they are all severe service operations. The nature of the severity depends on the specific process, but most involve high temperatures, and in some cases pyrolysis. Some processes that transform plastics chemically use a combination of heat, high-pressure, aggressive solvents, and corrosive catalysts. Many of these processes employ distillation to separate various fractions produced. All of these processes, and more, require careful process control using advanced instrumentation to maintain production and ensure safety. Today’s automation platforms integrate all these elements for reliable, continuous production.
Partial Stroke Testing
Partial stroke testing verifies the functionality of critical devices for emergency readiness.
Certified Safety Instrumented Systems
Rosemount instrumentation is second to none. It’s field-proven pressure and temperature technologies have achieved certification to the IEC 61508 safety standard.
Fisher Digital Isolation Solutions
Take the guesswork out of your safety instrumented system valve assemblies with our proven solutions and expertise.
AgileOps Operations Management Software
Smart instrumentation, operations software, advanced control systems and asset management tools give operators safe remote access to diagnostics with fit and forget sensors.
Rosemount Flame and Gas Detection
Integrated flame and gas detection solutions to keep people and facilities safe.
AMS Device Manager
Predictive maintenance helps plants avoid unplanned shutdowns and inefficient practices that eat away at profits. AMS Device Manager helps avoid these unnecessary costs with a window into the health of intelligent field devices.
Fisher™ ENVIRO-SEAL™ Control Valve Packing Systems
Live-loaded packing systems offer exceptional stem sealing to protect the environment against the emission of hazardous or polluting fluids.
Severe Service Control Valves
Severe service control valves are used to optimize performance in the most difficult installations within your process plant cavitating, erosive, corrosive, noisy, high pressure, high temperature, high pressure drop, or high velocity media).
One of the major advantages of a true circular economy built around plastic production and recycling is eliminating or reducing waste. Through boundless automation and access to real-time data you gain visibility into site energy performance. Monitor energy consumption and loss in real-time and uncover energy-savings and emissions lowering opportunities with these solutions.
Reduce Energy Use & Minimize Emissions
Monitor energy consumption and loss in real-time to uncover energy-savings and emissions lowering opportunities.
Fisher™ ENVIRO-SEAL™ Control Valve Packing Systems
Live-loaded packing systems offer exceptional stem sealing to protect the environment against the emission of hazardous or polluting fluids.
Plantweb™ Insight for Heat Exchangers
Unanticipated fouling can drive up energy costs and, if severe enough, result in an unscheduled shutdown. Heat exchanger monitoring can improve operational efficiency by enabling you to detect accelerated fouling early, identify sources of water contamination that can lead to corrosion, and plan for scheduled maintenance.
DeltaV Advanced Control
Effectively analyze fired heater performance with basic measurements and data to allow for combustion and control efficiency.
Rosemount™ 6888 In Situ Oxygen Analyzer
The Rosemount 6888 In Situ Oxygen Analyzer provides a continuous, accurate measurement of oxygen in flue gases coming from any combustion process.
Micro Motion Coriolis Flow and Density Meters
Our Coriolis meters deliver unmatched reliability for mass flow, volume flow & density measurement in your chemical operation.
Yarway Steam Traps
Emerson's Yarway steam traps that are suitable for a wide range of applications, with in-line repairable options.
Rosemount 8800 Series Vortex Flow Meters
Rosemount 8800 Series Vortex Flow Meters offer world-class reliability with a gasket-free, non-clog meter body that eliminates potential leak points, resulting in maximum process availability and fewer unscheduled shutdowns.
Rosemount 3051S for Distillation Column Flooding
Over-purifying polymers can lead to higher energy usage and cost but with built-in control performance diagnostics and advanced process control, you can generate optimum throughput and energy efficiency.
No company wants to develop a new process, only to discover that a successful pilot simply can’t be expanded to a scale that is sustainable economically. Project success can be achieved by implementing project execution tools and practices designed to minimize costs and reduce complexity. When these tools are used effectively, capital efficiency increases dramatically, and the likelihood of delivering a project on time and on budget, that works as expected, becomes a certainty.
Project Certainty
Emerson's project execution approach delivers solutions that eliminate costs, reduce complexity, and accommodate change to improve capital efficiency and deliver more reliable project schedules.
Smart Commissioning
A technology-enabled approach for streamlining the commissioning of field instrumentation connected to a DeltaV™ distributed control system (DCS).
DeltaV Virtualization
DeltaV™ Virtualization solutions reduce IT infrastructure complexity with automation-centered, fit-for-purpose hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).
Digital Twin Solutions
Digital twin solutions deliver dynamic simulation software that models physical environments, enabling you to perform advanced testing and train operators without affecting running processes.
Industrial Wireless Technology
Wireless solutions feature less cabling, faster commissioning and calibration-free devices, reducing installation time and costs by over 50% and minimizing the need for site surveys, equipment, engineering and training.
Frequently Asked Questions About Advanced Chemical Recycling
The term chemical recycling covers a variety of processes for breaking down plastic waste so it can be remanufactured, much as it was originally, or made into something else entirely. It uses several techniques that reflect the extent to which the waste is broken down.
Dissolution mixes waste with a suitable solvent to liquify it. While in this state, it is possible to remove incompatible waste and pigments. Once cleaned, application of an anti-solvent causes the polymer to resolidify in its pure form, ready to be used again. The solvent and anti-solvent can be separated via distillation for reuse.
Depolymerization uses a chemical reaction to break polymers back into their monomer form, allowing contaminants to be removed. A second reaction repolymerizes the monomer, turning it back into solid plastic again, in its pure form. This process operates under high pressure and temperature. Both of these require sorting prior to processing.
Other processes use pyrolysis, sometimes combined with steam, to break down waste, with the amount of heat determining the extent of decomposition. Mild approaches recover hydrocarbons suitable for use as fuels or feedstocks for manufacturing new plastic. More thorough pyrolysis can create syngas for a variety of uses. Pyrolysis processes are not as picky about sorting and can accept mixed waste but can be energy intensive.
Companies moving into the chemical recycling space start from scratch. Some are startups, others are new divisions of larger companies, but the process units are brand new. For example, PureCycle can create near-virgin polypropylene from waste plastic feedstock using a dissolution process. The company has very ambitious plans to build 50 new plants in the next 15 years using this approach. To make that goal a reality, PureCycle is partnering with Emerson to equip these new facilities with the Plantweb digital ecosystem, intelligent sensors and control valves, advanced operations software, and cloud data management systems. Adopting advanced digital automation technologies, it enables for faster project completion, fully integrated systems, and world-class operating performance.
It’s not difficult to see that the world is drowning in plastic trash, so recycling is enormously important, and we must be doing everything we can to encourage it. But it is only one step in the development of a true circular economy. Recycling acknowledges and facilitates our “single use” mentality where we buy something, use it, and throw it away. We must replace this linear mindset and move to a circular economy where products last several lifecycles. They’re designed to be reused, repaired, and remanufactured. When they reach the end of multiple uses, they are recycled easily to begin a new life. Obviously, making this happen requires designing this capability into a product from its conception. If practiced, this reduces environmental impact enormously, and reduces the very need for recycling.
Yes, this technique is called mechanical recycling and is practical within specific limits. Carefully sorted plastic trash, including sorting by color as well as material, can be shredded and cleaned, and then remelted. This is used primarily for polyethylene terephthalate (PET) material, which is used extensively for plastic beverage bottles. PET can withstand such treatment with minimal loss of quality, however most other plastic types are degraded in the remelting process.
The degree of sorting necessary depends on the nature of the process. For those processes producing recycled plastic equal to virgin material, such as polypropylene, the sorting must be very thorough, although most depolymerization and dissolution processes can remove colors. Pyrolysis processes are more tolerant of mixed feedstocks, but they reduce the final product to a much lower chemical state.