The recycling revolution
Recycling used yogurt containers back into yogurt containers? Impossible! That was the conventional wisdom for a long time – until the Belgian company Indaver developed a novel chemical recycling process.
Plastics with strange-sounding names are everywhere in our daily lives. A look inside any home refrigerator will reveal polystyrene and polyolefins such as polyethylene and polypropylene. These plastics are resistant to oils, fats and acids. They don’t leach substances, and they neither emit nor absorb odors. All of which makes them the perfect packaging material for foods and beverages. Plastics are used in trays for meat and mushrooms, containers for yogurt and cream, protective films, inner linings for milk cartons, and many more applications.
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180 kg
of packaging waste is generated annually by every European.
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26,000 tonnes
That’s the annual capacity of Indaver’s Plastics2Chemicals plant.
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10%
recycled material will be the minimum content requirement for food-grade packaging in the EU in the coming years.
But for all their various uses, plastics that have served their singular purpose are mostly incinerated or dumped straight into landfill. Globally, only about 10 percent of polyolefins are recycled, and only about 1 percent of polystyrene. “That’s because these plastics have until now been very difficult to reuse,” explains Johan Verdeyen, Chemical Industry Manager at Endress+Hauser Belgium. Food packaging waste has low bulk density, tends to be contaminated with food residue and frequently comprises multiple different materials. This makes sorting and cleaning for mechanical recycling very resource intensive. And even when it is recycled, safety considerations mean the recyclate can only be processed into non-food-grade products, such as shampoo bottles. Consequently, new food-grade packaging continues to be made from virgin petroleum-derived feedstocks.
Trailblazer in sustainable transformation
Indaver has been recovering valuable raw materials and clean energy from industrial and household waste for over 40 years. The company is also committed to removing pollutants safely from the material cycle to protect people and the environment. Thus it is helping create a cleaner, more resilient society and supporting the transition to a circular economy. Indaver is one of Europe’s leading companies in sustainable waste and materials management, with locations in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and the UK. In 2024, a workforce of over 2,300 processed 5.6 million tonnes of waste, generating 945 million euros in sales. Indaver sees the commitment and expertise of its highly motivated employees as key to successful projects and services.
From the trash to Indaver and back into the refrigerator
Indaver wants to change this. The Belgian pioneer of sustainable waste processing aims to make food packaging circular. To this end, last year it put a groundbreaking chemical recycling plant into service following investments totaling 105 million euros. The Plastics2Chemicals facility in Antwerp uses a technology developed in-house by Indaver to break down end-of-life plastics into their original chemical components. Further processing purifies these to the point where they are of virgin quality and hence suitable for reuse in food packaging production. So now, it is finally possible to make new yogurt containers from old ones.
“With Plastics2Chemicals, we have succeeded in converting waste into valuable raw materials. We achieved this result by combining innovation, vision, entrepreneurship, collaboration and craftsmanship,” Indaver CEO Karl Huts announced at the Plastics2Chemicals plant’s official opening in September 2025. Partnerships right across the value chain have been instrumental in this project’s industrialization. The company collaborated with universities to research the new thermal depolymerization technology and validate the process step by step. Other partners provide waste plastic feedstock and purchase the end products. And when it comes to measurement technology, Indaver has chosen Endress+Hauser as its partner for all requirements. The plant uses over a thousand Endress+Hauser measuring instruments to ensure efficient and reliable processes from end to end.
Efficiency through digitalization
“The partnership with Indaver has grown over time, and the collaboration has strengthened over the last five years based on mutual respect and knowledge sharing,” says Johan Puimège, a business consultant at Endress+Hauser Belgium. “We share a common approach to projects: a strong focus on operational excellence, leveraging the latest technologies.”
Endress+Hauser became involved in the Antwerp project at its very early stages. The team was tasked with optimizing engineering, supply, commissioning, operations and maintenance – and hence costs – over the plant’s entire life cycle. “Thus we assumed responsibility for all aspects of network engineering and the choice of instrumentation and developed a digitalization concept,” says Puimège. The result was an instrumentation system that is tailored perfectly to Indaver’s requirements, which in turn ensures process stability and high efficiency.
New building blocks
To this day, virtually all recycling of plastic waste is done mechanically. Material is sorted, shredded, washed, dried, melted down and processed into granulate. But because the chemical structure of the polymers stays unchanged, the quality of the recyclate depends largely on how well the feedstock was sorted and cleaned. And therein lies the problem: Waste plastic, particularly packaging waste, is often a heavily contaminated mix of materials. Moreover, with mechanical processes, plastics can’t be endlessly recycled, and the recyclate often can’t be reused for the original application. With chemical recycling, on the other hand, the polymer chains that make up the plastics are broken down into molecules – their original chemical building blocks. These building blocks can then go into making new plastics of the same quality as virgin plastics made from fossil raw materials, which makes them suitable for demanding applications like food-grade packaging.
Inside the reactor: How the innovative process works
Indaver mechanically pre-treats end-of-life plastics at a separate facility, then transports the resulting agglomerates to Antwerp, where they are stored in silos. From there, the agglomerates are conveyed pneumatically into an extruder where they are heated from solid to hot paste form and then fed into an electric pyrolysis reactor.
“The main challenge in our process relates to the reactor, which operates both at very high and very low temperatures,” explains Indaver project engineer Roel Sommen. The reactor first gasifies the paste by heating it to over 400°C under oxygen-free conditions. The gases are then cooled extremely quickly in quench skids, going from over 400°C to about 100°C in just one or two seconds. The result is a liquid product that is then transferred to two large distillation towers that separate out the constituent fractions to obtain the final product. Indaver stores this in six large 250,000-liter tanks and two 50,000-liter tanks.
To reduce the engineering costs and speed up commissioning, Endress+Hauser turned to its Central Engineering Platform, a digital hub for the gamut of tools, data and processes. Endress+Hauser uses the platform to streamline instrument selection and configuration, to help create technical data sheets and CAD models, and to simulate prices. “We were able to track all decisions in real time and then simply export the data,” says Indaver project engineer Roel Sommen. “The approach is innovative, efficient and time-saving.”
The project also uses digital technology to optimize maintenance, with intelligent sensors sending their measurement values and supplementary data over a secure channel to the Endress+Hauser Netilion cloud. Thanks to this IIoT platform, the team at Indaver can use terminal devices – such as industrial tablets – to manage plant assets, access instrument documentation, initiate verifications remotely and view diagnostic data to check that sensors are working properly. “We want to improve efficiency in all areas. For us, the biggest quick win from digitalization is fast access to all data,” says Steven Coppens, Chief Engineer, Engineering & Instrumentation at Indaver.
Major commercial potential
The Plastics2Chemicals plant in Antwerp currently has a capacity of about three tonnes an hour, or roughly 26,000 tonnes a year. Indaver aims to grow that figure to 65,000 tonnes, which will involve commissioning a second line. “Indaver is also in talks to build further advanced recycling facilities throughout Europe,” explains Endress+Hauser Belgium’s Chemical Industry Manager Johan Verdeyen.
In last year’s initial phase, Indaver concentrated exclusively on recycling pre-treated polystyrene from food packaging – such as yogurt containers and meat trays – into high-purity styrene. Now, chemical partners are polymerizing this back into polystyrene – and the results can already be found in the foam meat trays used by a Belgian supermarket chain. There are also plans to use a percentage of this recyclate in manufacturing yogurt containers. This year, Indaver also started recycling polyolefin waste into naphtha and wax. The value added by these kinds of processes will keep rising because the EU has mandated a minimum of 10 percent recycled content for certain types of plastic packaging – particularly those intended for direct contact with food – by 2030. This requirement will likely help to make recycled plastic a valuable commodity.
“Our in-house developed technology, combined with strategic partnerships and continuous innovation, enables us to deliver high-purity materials for demanding applications like food packaging – proving that circularity and performance can go hand in hand,” says Erik Moerman, Sales and Development General Manager at Indaver Plastics2Chemicals.
The specialists at Endress+Hauser are impressed by Indaver’s feat in commercializing the chemical recycling of polystyrene. “By building the Antwerp plant, Indaver is proving its willingness to invest in innovation and stick to its principles. It’s companies like Indaver that are working to create circularity and which matter to the future of our economy,” says Endress+Hauser’s Johan Puimège. The project has further strengthened the partnership between the two companies. To quote Indaver engineer Roel Sommen: “The collaboration between us has gone very smoothly – and we’re a good fit on a personal level, too. For me, Johan is more of a colleague than a supplier.”
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