The good economic news is linked on the Seine axis.
After the announcement of exclusive negotiations with Dubai's AKS for the installation of one of the largest sugar factories in Europe in the port of Rouen (Seine-Maritime), it is the turn of the American Eastman to want to build in Port-Jérôme-sur-Seine (Seine-Maritime) the world's largest plastics recycling plant.
160,000 tonnes of polyester recycled per year
An investment of 850 million euros which, according to the company, could make it possible to create 350 direct jobs and 1,500 indirect jobs by 2025. An XXL industrial tool which “would make it possible to recycle approximately 160,000 tonnes of polyester waste per year “, according to the Normandy Region, which is pleased in passing that this project is “apart from the Douais gigafactory, the largest foreign investment in France in the past 30 years”.
If the site, in competition with two others in France, has been selected, it is because it has several advantages according to the press release from the firm based in Tennessee and which employs 14,000 people worldwide: "proximity of supply with the polyester waste for the raw material, the space required for an extensive facility and the infrastructure necessary for operations of this scale”.
Household packaging and textile waste
The future Eastman plant will be supplied with polyester waste from household packaging and textile waste, which is difficult to recycle and generally incinerated today.
It will transform them into recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) which can be used in a multitude of sectors, as shown by the list of companies that have already signed letters of intent for multi-year supply contracts from the Normandy site: LVMH Beauty, The Estée Lauder companies, Clarins, Procter & Gamble, L'Oréal and Danone.
Read alsoWhat would happen if we stopped recycling for a day?
With this announcement, Port-Jérôme-sur-Seine confirms its status as a stronghold of the circular economy since two other projects related to plastic recycling are due to materialize there: that of the British Plastic Energy, under construction, and that of the Canadians of Loop Industrie who have planned to invest 250 million euros in a factory which should employ 180 employees from 2025.
