Röhm, POLYVANTIS, Pekutherm, and NEXTCHEM, the sustainable technology division of MAIRE Group through its subsidiary MyRemono, established a Europe-wide alliance for the recycling of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), pooling their expertise and strengths to establish a sustainable circular economy for PMMA in Europe.

Management team from Röhm, Pekutherm, MARIE and MyRemono.

With the partnership, more PMMA materials can now be processed through both mechanical and chemical recycling and returned to the market as MMA and PMMA in virgin-like quality.

This is made possible by combining NEXTCHEM's proprietary NXRe chemical recycling technology with an innovative purification method developed and piloted by Röhm researchers at the company's largest production and innovation site in Worms, Germany.

Leveraging expertise from each partner

The logistics partner Pekutherm offers PMMA processing companies across Europe with customized concepts for plastic waste disposal. As the largest company in Europe specialized in PMMA recycling, Pekutherm has a sorting capacity of 10,000 tons per year.

Pekutherm ensures that the collected scrap and waste is separated by type, passes through a multi-step sorting process and is granulated in a defined geometry. This is done for both post-industrial recyclable materials and post-consumer plastic waste.

The recyclable materials collected by Pekutherm and processed for mechanical recycling are then delivered to its partners Röhm and POLYVANTIS, where they are reused as a raw material in production after just one additional processing step.

MyRemono, NEXTCHEM's subsidiary specializing in plastics recycling, will receive the remaining PMMA. This can be chemically converted back into pure MMA using NXRe technology, an advanced and efficient molten metal depolymerization process.

This continuous process for recycling plastic waste is brought to industrial scale for the first time in Italy with the support of the EU Innovation Fund. The plant is expected to be completed in 2026 and will have an initial processing capacity of 5,000 tons of PMMA per year – the equivalent of around 10 million car taillights.

The recycled MMA is expected to feature a carbon footprint reduction of more than 90%, which means an annual avoidance of around 13,000 tons of greenhouse gases at full capacity.

“Together, we are taking responsibility in the face of limited resources and processing a considerable amount of valuable raw materials for reuse in production,” said Hans-Peter Hauck, Chief Operating Officer at Röhm.