Covestro and Neste Collaboration Underway for Renewable PC Raw Materials

Helsinki-based Neste and Covestro (U.S. office in Pittsburgh) have entered into a strategic cooperation in Europe to promote the use of sustainable raw materials in plastics production. Neste will supply Covestro with material from renewable sources to replace a significant portion of the fossil raw materials used to date in the manufacture of PC resins. Polycarbonate is used in applications ranging from car headlamps, LED lights, electronic and medical devices and automotive glazing. (At the K-2019 trade show, SABIC launched the first PC based on certified renewable feedstock—60% of it is made from tall oil derived from pulp waste.)

Over the short term, the collaboration aims to replace several thousand tons of fossil raw materials in the production of polycarbonates with raw materials produced with Neste’s renewable  hydrocarbons, produced entirely from renewable raw materials, such as waste and residue oils and fats. Thanks to being a drop-in replacement to commonly-used fossil feedstock in the polymers production, Neste’s product is suitable for existing production infrastructures and enables customers like Covestro to produce more sustainable products with consistently high quality using their existing processes.

Said Covestro´s CEO Dr. Markus Steilemann. "With this collaboration we are emphasizing our intention to make our production more sustainable and to drive forward the change to a circular economy. Using alternative raw materials more intensively as we are doing is an important basis for this. We are fully committed to working with many partners to manage the transition to a circular economy, the great overall social project of the coming years and decades. To this end, we are also cooperating with upstream partners such as Neste to meet our own raw material requirements from renewable sources to an even greater extent. By transforming our production, we are helping important industrial sectors such as the automotive and electronics industries achieve greater sustainability and reduce the dependence on crude oil.”

In the future, both companies intend to expand the scope of their partnership to other types of polymers. At the same time, they are inviting other stakeholders along the value chains to cooperate.