In a large warehouse, bales of plastic waste reveal logos that are quite familiar to French consumers — Tex-Mex ready meals, red and blue soda brands, snack wrappers, etc. Compacted into bundles weighing over 420 kilos by waste management specialist Paprec, the material is then delivered to the TotalEnergies site.

"Zero-oil platform"

Rather than being incinerated or landfilled — like roughly three-quarters of plastic waste in France — this by-product of consumer society is, the group says, destined for a more virtuous use: helping close the loop on plastic production by substituting for naphtha, its primary raw material.

Naphtha is largely a product of oil refining—the very activity that defined the vast Grandpuits gigantic facility for decades. Since 1967, the site produced gasoline and diesel for road transport, kerosene for aviation, fuel oil, as well as gas and naphtha. But in 2020, a leak in the pipeline supplying crude oil from Le Havre prompted the hydrocarbon giant to convert the huge industrial site into a “zero-oil platform.” Since then, some of the project’s initial ambitions have been scaled back, with several planned activities put on hold.

However, on Thursday, March 19, TotalEnergies announced the launch of what it describes as “France’s first advanced plastics recycling plant,” using a technology developed by the British firm Plastic Energy. Last August, the company said it had produced plastic pyrolysis oil — marketed under the brand name “Tacoil” — at its plant in Geleen, Netherlands, operated in partnership with the Saudi chemicals giant Sabic.

At the Grandpuits site, the first tanker truck of Tacoil — a dark, flammable oil — left in early March for Antwerp, Belgium, where TotalEnergies operates a refining and petrochemicals platform, according to site director Guillaume Alliot. This hydrocarbon can be used to produce recycled plastics “of the same quality as virgin plastics,” the group said in a press release. TotalEnergies sources its plastic waste from Paprec and the eco-organization Citeo.

The project’s scale remains limited. The facility can process up to 15,000 tonnes of waste a year — less than 0.3% of the 5.5 million tonnes of household packaging expected to be placed on the French market in 2024, according to Citeo. At full capacity, it would generate roughly one truckload of pyrolysis oil per day — a drop in the ocean.

Challenging the “recycling myth”

The economic model for chemical plastic recycling “is still under construction,” and “it will take years before the activity reaches significant production volumes,” Jean-Yves Daclin, Managing Director for France at Plastics Europe — the industry association — told AFP in early February. The process is energy-intensive and costly, while demand for the resulting materials remains limited for the time being.

Beth Gardiner, author of Plastic Inc. — a book on an industry set to produce a record 430.9 million tonnes of virgin plastic worldwide in 2024 — notes that pyrolysis oil must be “blended with large amounts of virgin naphtha” from petroleum to create new plastic. “The industry is really trying to sell chemical recycling as a miracle solution” to the plastic waste crisis, she adds, “but the evidence simply isn’t there.”

The NGO Zero Waste also criticizes the process for perpetuating the “myth” of infinitely recyclable plastic, when in fact this material degrades throughout its lifespan.

Nonetheless, chemical recycling is one of the solutions authorities are exploring to reduce pollution from plastic packaging. In early February, the 27 member states of the European Union approved its inclusion in the mandatory recycled content requirements for plastic bottles.