ECOCE is a non-profit environmental civil association created and sponsored by the food and beverage industry in Mexico. It administers Mexico’s national private collective packaging management plan for post-consumer PET, HDPE, aluminum, and other materials on behalf of its member companies. This industry-led plan functions as a producer responsibility scheme through which participating companies jointly organize and finance the collection and recycling of their post-consumer packaging. Through nationwide collection, education, and take-back initiatives, ECOCE coordinates the recovery of post-consumer packaging and channels it into recycling systems across Mexico, a country of approximately 132 million people. Its membership includes many of Mexico’s leading beverage and food groups, including global consumer brands. Recognized as a pioneer in PET recovery and recycling in the country, ECOCE is now placing greater emphasis on the circularity of flexible plastic packaging by creating valuable circular destinations for these materials in support of the circularity commitments of its member companies.
Under this collaboration, ECOCE and Aduro are focused on evaluating the application of HCT on real post-consumer flexible plastic packaging from Mexico, including multi-layer and mixed structures, sourced through ECOCE’s post-consumer packaging collection and management systems. The collaboration contemplates that ECOCE would identify, characterize and supply representative material, while Aduro would conduct a structured, multi-stage program of Hydrochemolytic testing at its development facilities, from laboratory through pilot scale, to help assess processability, yields, product quality, and potential applications for the resulting liquid products.
The collaboration is intended to address one of the most challenging fractions in Mexico’s waste stream: post-consumer flexible plastic packaging. Mexico generates close to 60 kilograms of plastic waste per person every year, adding up to an estimated six to seven million tonnes of plastic waste annually. Within this total, flexible plastic packaging is a large and fast-growing category, with recent estimates indicating that around 1.5 million tonnes of this material are generated annually in Mexico, approximately 1.6 times the volume of PET beverage containers. Because these materials often combine multiple polymers, layers, inks, and adhesives in thin formats, they rarely fit into existing collection and mechanical recycling systems, and a high proportion is still destined for incineration, landfill, or leakage into the environment.
Hydrochemolytic™ Technology (HCT) is a patent-backed chemistry platform developed by Aduro that operates at moderate temperatures with catalysts to break down large hydrocarbon molecules into smaller, more valuable liquid products. In plastics applications, HCT is designed to convert mixed and contaminated waste streams, including multilayer and flexible plastic packaging that is difficult to manage mechanically, into liquid hydrocarbons suitable for further upgrading and use as petrochemical feedstocks, including in steam crackers. Recent independent pilot-scale steam-cracking trials have shown that a sample of Hydrochemolytic™ Oil produced from plastics using HCT can be processed as produced, with little or no costly post-treatment, while delivering stable furnace operation and olefin yields comparable to conventional fossil feedstocks, providing key building blocks for the production of new plastics.
