Eastman Scales Advanced Plastics Recycling Amid Texas Plant Setback
When the U.S. Department of Energy announced plans to cut $3.7 billion in clean-energy grants last week, an Eastman Chemical Co. recycling facility slated to open in 2028 was among the casualties.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced the termination of 24 awards from the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, including Eastman's planned Longview, Texas, methanolysis plant. According to the Longview News-Journal, the plant was set to receive a $375 million grant to build a nearly $1.2 billion plastics recycling facility.
DOE stated that after a thorough financial review, these projects "failed to advance the energy needs of the American people, were not economically viable and would not generate a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars."
The Longview plant would process hard-to-recycle plastic waste, similar to a facility currently operating in Kingsport, Tennessee.
Eastman is among a growing number of chemical manufacturers employing technologies that use high temperatures to break discarded plastics into their molecular building blocks.
Eastman’s Chemical Recycling Strategy
This technology, which Eastman has divided into carbon renewal and polyester renewal segments, is fast becoming a major growth area for the company. In the company's 2024 annual report, CEO Mark Costa cited the Kingsport methanolysis plant as “a key growth driver.” Costa said the Kingsport methanolysis facility is expected to contribute $75 million to $100 million in EBITDA growth in 2025.
But the technology presents unique operational challenges for manufacturers. For instance, high temperatures and pressures are needed to convert the polyester into feedstocks, such as dimethyl terephthalate and ethylene glycol.
Mike Strickler, an associate electrical engineer with Eastman, discussed the company's automation strategy to address these challenges during the 2025 Emerson Exchange conference in San Antonio in mid-May.
As Control Global reported, the process requires sophisticated automation and instrumentation systems capable of managing extreme temperatures — often reaching 600°F — among other demanding conditions. The company deployed a series of instrumentation and control technologies to process the waste in the most efficient and reliable way possible, he told session attendees.
Teresa Edwards, a senior sales representative with Emerson, broke down the instrumentation configuration in detail. The company took an aggressive approach to measurement, deploying hundreds of flowmeters and pressure transmitters.
When Edwards mentioned the number of flowmeters deployed, several session attendees seemed surprised. She explained that Eastman is looking to refine the recycling process with verifiable data before scaling globally.
"I know these numbers sound big on the instrumentation side, but you have to remember this has never been done before," she said. "Eastman has had this technology for over 20 years, but this is the first time that it went to production scale, so they wanted to make sure that they had enough instruments installed that if something went wrong, they knew why it went wrong and where. They wanted to ensure they had the best technology in the line to give them the information needed so that Longview may be able to skip some of the hurdles that Kingsport went through."
Overcoming Operational Challenges Through Automation
Eastman is one of several chemical manufacturers adopting this type of plastics circularity technology, known by several names, including molecular, chemical and advanced recycling. This emerging approach differs significantly from traditional mechanical recycling in both process and capability.
Mechanical recycling follows a straightforward physical process: collecting plastic waste, cleaning and shredding it, then remelting it into plastic pellets for new products. The process has some limitations, though. It can only process two of the seven standard plastic types, primarily PET and HDPE, according to Eastman. Molecular recycling takes a different approach by breaking plastics down to their molecular components. This process can accept a much wider range of plastic types, including mixed and contaminated materials that mechanical recycling cannot handle.
When material arrives at Eastman’s Kingsport plant, the company chops the plastic waste, filters impurities like metals and then moves to a depolymerization process, Strickler said. In the depolymerization process, the material moves up a conveyor and is then dumped into a dissolver where it’s combined with chemicals and heated to high temperatures.
Global Expansion Plans and Local Sourcing Strategy
The company is using the feedstock both internally in its own products and selling it externally to partners, Strickler told Chemical Processing. The end product is not 100% recycled content. It follows the mass-balance approach, which allows for some virgin material to be mixed with the circular plastics, he added.
The Kingsport facility, which came online in March 2024, is processing 110,000 metric tons of plastic waste annually. In addition to the Longview plant, the company has another site recycling plant planned in Normandy, France. The Longview site was expected to be online in 2028, and the company has set a 2029/2030 timeframe for the France facility.
While the company is expanding globally, it’s maintaining local sourcing initiatives to further reduce its carbon footprint, Strickler said. The company works with 100 sources of waste within a 150-mile radius.
“One of the things that you might think about is if I ship the stuff across the country, am I going to increase my greenhouse gases?” Strickler explained. “But Eastman has alliances with local suppliers that can provide us this feedstock that we're using for our facility.”
