Creating a Planned Digital Community

Summary

Digital transformation is in the sights of many companies. Some are well on their way along the journey to a smarter plant; others are just getting started. It would be great if a new greenfield plant could start at a point beyond transformation—born digital. PureCycle, a chemical processor looking to turn plastic waste into a renewable resource, is doing just that.

PureCycle is transforming polypropylene into versatile replenishable ultra-pure resin through a unique purification process that removes odor, colors, and contaminants. Its mission is to revolutionize plastic waste recycling, and it’s doing that in part by rethinking plant design. It is centralizing the design and building of its plants in a way that allows it to copy and paste its plant modules.

PureCycle CEO Dustin Olson contacted James Haw, now Vice President of Program Management & Digital Strategy for the company, to discuss the new technological breakthrough in plastics recycling and seeking advice on automation technologies that could be applied to this new technology. The ensuing conversation touched on how to implement automation to set the company up for long-term success and avoid having to launch “digital transformation.” Instead, the two discussed how to become a “born digital” plant from the start.

The resulting collaboration marked the beginning of what Haw describes as “a remarkable opportunity to work at PureCycle and implement an automated industrial process using cutting-edge foundational technologies to help create a planned digital community that would make costly transformations less likely and easier to implement.”

Planning a digital community

Haw said that during development of a digital ecosystem, interfaces with other business systems are established to create a true digital thread so each system digitally extracts or writes information consistently.

“The digital footprint for the entire operation is coordinated, designed, and built like a planned digital community,” Haw said. “The reason is because application or system mismatches—and the integration work undertaken to force them to work with one another after the fact—has historically increased budget and schedule dramatically, and has resulted in a unique system requiring increased maintenance and development over its entire lifecycle. It’s the transformation we will ultimately avoid.”

“Our forward-thinking approach means our facilities are born digital,” said Olson. In partnership with Emerson, “we are building smart facilities from the get-go,” he said. “PureCycle is leapfrogging to the latest generation automation technology, employing virtual reality [VR], augmented reality [AR], and artificial intelligence [AI]. Projects can be completed faster and operate with world-class performance. It’s pure digital through our unprecedented purification process and leadingedge approach.

Haw explains further: “What it means for us in the short term is that we get all the great things that provide value now, like highly integrated basic process control systems [BPCS]; digital twins; high-performance graphics; alarm rationalization, management, and adherence to alarm philosophy from the start; ergonomic control room and building design; building management; central hub support to worldwide facilities; mobility concepts as part of our culture; and harnessing AI to reach higher levels of autonomy—all from the beginning.”

PureCycle Plant on track to begin production this year

Munich-based KraussMaffei, manufacturer of plastics and rubber processing machines, delivered the final piece of the major equipment needed for PureCycle’s Ironton, Ohio, plant on December 19, 2022. The delivery of the final extruder came sooner than anticipated amid supply chain difficulties and will enable PureCycle to stay on track to finish construction of the plant. Pellet production is expected to begin this year.

“We are building on existing ideas so we can scale faster, run more efficiently, and increase productivity, enabled through a digital plant built today for tomorrow,” said Olson. “We aren’t weighed down by concepts that don’t work. PureCycle is centralizing the building of our plants, which allows us to copy and paste our plant modules. This replication approach from multiple production lines at one location will speed up the building process, decrease operating costs, improve efficiency, and enhance safety.”

Olson said you can’t leverage the full value of smart digital unless everything is smart digital. “If you went out to an existing plant and you upgraded a few control valves, monitors, and transmitters, that system would become a little bit better. But you’re never going to be able to really leverage the power of digital unless the entire system and ecosystem is working together. This is where doing it straight out of the gate is much better.”

Recycling reimagined: Purifying the plastic PureCycle’s patented process is using a technology that Procter & Gamble first developed in 2012. Our approach to innovation not only includes products and packaging, but also technologies that allow us and others to have a positive impact on our environment. This technology, which can remove virtually all contaminants and colors from used plastic, has the capacity to revolutionize the plastics recycling industry by enabling P&G and companies around the world to tap into sources of recycled plastics that deliver nearly identical performance and properties as virgin materials in a broad range of applications,” said Kathy Fish, P&G’s Chief Technology Officer.

According to Haw, PureCycle’s patented recycling process dissolves polypropylene waste feedstock using a proprietary solvent, which then separates color, odor, and impurities from polypropylene to transform it into an ultra-pure recycled (UPR) resin (Figure 1).

Sustainability at the forefront

Olson said PureCycle will change how people view and use plastic. “We exist to attack the waste crisis and are about to make plastic cool again. The PureCycle era of plastic recycling is here. The problem we all face is huge. About 500 billion pounds of plastic are produced every year. Around one third of that is polypropylene. Nearly 10% of polypropylene is recycled currently. That’s about 175 to 200 billion pounds of polypropylene per year, and less than 10% is recycled. That means about 20 billion pounds is recycled globally, leaving a 180-billion-pound hole. That’s what we aim to attack.”

According to Olson, the problem with plastic is not plastic itself. He said the problem with plastic is that we don’t recycle it. “We have a pretty simple mission. We believe plastic can be a renewable resource. There’s no reason that we have to put it in the landfill. There’s no reason to incinerate it. There’s no reason to allow plastic to leak to the environment. The problem with plastic is recycling. We have to find a way to keep reusing it. That’s true circularity.”

“PureCycle will close the loop on circularity,” said Olson. “We have great environmental credentials. We’re a true sustainability company. That’s all we do. It’s not a piece of our business. It is our entire business. There are many different technologies coming out, and we need them all. The problem is so big that we really shouldn’t and can’t rely on one solution to solve them all. But we believe ours is unique. Some technologies break down the molecule, but we’re like a dry-cleaning plant for the molecule. We wash it. We wash the contaminants away and preserve the structure of the molecule.”

Olson said PureCycle has the technology to accomplish the washing and reusing of molecules. “We believe this is the way the world is going. The problem with traditional recycled product is it takes a lot of sorting on the front end. When you put it all together, you end up with a product that’s gray or dark or black. It can’t be used in every application. We wash the molecule and leave behind the white clear product. We remove the odor, colors, and the contaminants that are on the outside and inside to produce a product that’s just like fossil polypropylene.”

Looking ahead

Olson said PureCycle’s future is bright. “We’re very excited to be part of this transition; we’re very excited to be purely ESG [environmental, social, governance], where everything we do every day is focused on improving the planet. We’re thankful of our relationship with Emerson and hopeful about where the planet’s going in the future. There’s value in helping the world get to a better place. And if we have an opportunity to be a leader in recycling and a leader in digital, then I think it’ll be incumbent on us to do it.”

_{This feature originally appeared in the IIoT & Industry 4.0 edition of Automation 2023.}