PNNL Teams with Refinity to Turn Plastic Waste into Valuable Industrial Products

The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has formed a partnership with the Orlando-based firm Refinity, which has licensed a key process from PNNL that will help the company convert mixed plastic waste into valuable industrial products like chemicals, plastics, and fuels.

Refinity uses a patented conversion process to turn mixed plastic waste, including postconsumer rigid and flexible packaging, into short carbon chain molecules such as ethylene and propylene. Known as light olefins, these molecules can serve as critical building blocks for a wide variety of industrial products—but there’s a catch.

“When you make olefins from mixed plastic waste, they have a lot of impurities,” said Udishnu Sanyal, a chemical engineer at PNNL. “Many industrial applications of light olefins, like fuels and plastics, are very sensitive to impurities and require clean olefin precursors. So, in order to make the olefins useful for those industries, you need to go through additional separation and clean-up procedures, which increase the cost and complexity of the process,” Sanyal added.

A chain for the better

PNNL has a long history of chemistry research, and catalysis research in particular. One highlight of this research is oligomerization, a process that can combine short carbon chains into long, industrially potent carbon chains. While the Lab’s work in this area has mostly centered on very specific light olefins, the researchers are working to adapt their patented catalytic oligomerization process for Refinity’s particular use case.

“Our catalysts would take Refinity’s mixture of ethylene and propylene and convert them into pure carbon chains in the C₈–C₁₆ range without the need for as many separation and clean-up procedures. This is perfect for making fuels,” said Mond Guo, an engineer and commercialization manager at PNNL. “Now, instead of just being able to accept one feedstock material, we can accept a mixed bag of all sorts of light olefins. That opens up a ton of new feedstocks that can be effectively leveraged for conversion into valuable products.”

What’s next

For now, Refinity intends to leverage the licensed process to convert plastic waste into jet fuel range liquids for use in sustainable aviation fuel. The company plans to demonstrate the end-to-end conversion process—mixed plastic waste to light olefins to distillate-range hydrocarbon liquids—by the end of the year. But PNNL’s work with Refinity to advance U.S. energy dominance and leverage domestic feedstocks likely won’t end there.

“The C₈–C₁₆ range is great for fuels,” Sanyal said. “But we’re also interested in working together to help Refinity achieve much narrower distributions that could enable other products: for instance, C₁₄ to C₁₈, which could be used to produce lubricant precursors.”

Throughout the partnership with Refinity, the researchers have worked alongside PNNL’s Office of Collaboration and Commercialization, which helped the team navigate each step of the technology transfer process.

“Partnerships like this demonstrate how PNNL’s expertise and decades of experience in catalysis, chemical processing, and working with industry can move technologies beyond the laboratory to address real commercial opportunities,” said Allan Tuan, integrated partnership team lead at PNNL. “By translating fundamental research into scalable technologies that improve efficiency, expand feedstock flexibility, and create higher-value products, we’re helping companies accelerate commercialization while advancing additional manufacturing pathways.”

“We are very enthusiastic about our partnership with PNNL,” said Bill Grieco, Refinity’s CEO. “By combining our light olefins production technology with PNNL’s catalytic upgrading capabilities, we believe we can produce customized circular hydrocarbons and unlock additional value from waste plastic while expanding feedstock options for fuels and petrochemical products.”

The development of PNNL’s catalytic oligomerization process was enabled by support from the Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels and Feedstocks Office, formerly known as the Bioenergy Technologies Office.