PureCycle provides Ironton purification facility production update

PureCycle Technologies announced an update on the status of activities at the company’s flagship purification facility located in Ironton, Ohio. PureCycle restarted operations in late December and has since been ramping up operations. PureCycle CEO Dustin Olson said, “We’ve experienced substantial progress over the past month. We repaired the mechanica seal failure from December, which was caused by a minor component malfunction. Plus, the installation of the automatic screen changer and the other improvements we recently made are proving to be effective and helping us run more continuously.” Olson added, “The adsorbent bead debris has largely been flushed from the system and the recent longer periods of operation will allow our team to optimize the process for both cost and process efficiencies.” In the last two weeks, PureCycle produced 183,000 pounds of pellets. That is nearly the same amount produced during the fourth quarter of 2023. This includes six different 24-hour periods, where the team produced levels that have increased from 10,000 pounds to 72,000 pounds. All the pellets made since coming back online have been produced from post-consumer recycled material. “We have run a wide variety of feedstock that includes recycled curbside material, woven polypropylene, and agglomerated agricultural twine,” Olson said. “We have purposefully run challenging feeds to test our technology, define the boundaries of our technology, and to set us up for long-term feedstock flexibility. Each of these feedstocks have different levels of contaminants and different physical properties. We are seeing those contaminants successfully come out in the process with the increased production of co-product one and co-product two.” As the team in Ironton works to continue increasing run rates, a primary focus will be on the co-product recovery system. During the November outage, our team implemented several improvements to simplify the removal of co-product one from the system. Co-product one is a waxy, low-molecular weight polypropylene material that is pulled out of the extraction column. Co-product one removal was originally a challenging operation and a plant limitation, but since the November upgrades, it is operating reliably, consistently and is no longer a constraint to our production.