Neste has officially commissioned its new €111 million upgrading facility for liquefied waste plastic (LWP) at its Porvoo refinery, marking a major milestone in chemical recycling.
The facility, the largest of its kind globally, can process up to 150,000 tons of LWP annually, producing high-quality feedstock for the plastics and chemicals industry. Processing will be gradually ramped up.
“The successful commissioning proves that we can process liquefied waste plastic at an industrial scale. This achievement demonstrates Neste's capability to develop advanced technology, set safety standards, and create new supply chains for challenging new raw materials.
"We are proud of this achievement, and I want to express my sincere thanks to our partners and employees whose dedication has allowed us to turn this vision into a reality,” said Jori Sahlsten, Executive Vice President of Oil Products at Neste.
Neste has been processing liquefied waste plastic, including pyrolysis oil, since 2020. Construction of the new facility and its integration with the existing refinery began in 2023 and concluded at the end of 2025. Production ramp-up began in 2026 and will continue gradually, depending on market demand and regulatory developments.
The facility addresses a critical challenge in chemical recycling: the quality gap between crude liquefied plastic waste and the high-grade drop-in materials required by the petrochemical industry. While mechanical recycling remains essential, it often struggles with low-quality or mixed waste. Neste’s new plant is designed to handle oils from difficult waste streams, including multi-layer packaging, mixed plastics, and contaminated materials.
“We enable the scale-up of chemical recycling by upgrading liquefied plastic waste. The plastic originates from low-quality waste streams not suitable for mechanical recycling and destined for incineration or landfills.
"Thanks to our new facility, even hard-to-recycle plastic waste can be upgraded to meet the feedstock quality requirements of companies manufacturing high-quality plastics. However, the current European Commission’s calculation rules on recycled content in the Single Use Plastics Directive threaten to limit the ability of refineries to serve EU’s recycled content targets.
"For Europe's competitiveness sake, we need to ensure the calculation rules are amended to include refineries in the context of the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation,” said Maiju Helin, Director of Polymers and Chemicals at Neste.
At the facility, liquefied waste plastic is processed alongside crude oil, using a mass balance approach to attribute recycled raw materials to Neste RE products. By chemically recycling plastic waste instead of incinerating it, the process can reduce virgin fossil resource consumption by over 70% and greenhouse gas emissions by more than 35%, replacing fossil feedstock in plastics manufacturing.
