Almost one year ago, we announced jointly “Emerson and PureCycle Technologies Sign Multi-year Global Agreement for Digital Technologies and Services”. At the 2022 ARC Industry Forum in Orlando, PureCycle’s Chief Operating Officer Dustin Olson shared more about the company’s “Born Digital” strategy.
This recently released YouTube video encapsulates this strategy.
Dustin opened his presentation by sharing his background in the petrochemical business for over 20 years in operations, maintenance, engineering, and finance. He moved to PureCycle because of its mission to effectively and efficiently recycle polypropylene back to nearly its original state. Polypropylene is used in a wide range of applications due to its versatility. You’ll find it in things you use every day. Look carefully next time you eat yogurt or buy grapes and you’ll notice a the recycling symbol with the No. 5 written inside. That’s polypropylene.
The PureCycle process removes odors, colors, and other impurities from polypropylene. A traditional recycling process could recycle plastic waste into lower-quality products like park benches but is unable to restore polypropylene waste to a purer resin.
Dustin then transitioned to discuss PureCycle’s Born Digital strategy. Their goal is to produce a billion pounds of recycled polypropylene by 2025. The Born Digital philosophy encompasses:
- A vision built on rethinking plastic recycling
- To start with a digital mindset and it becomes part of the culture
- To build on existing ideas to scale faster, run more efficiently, and increase productivity
- A ground-breaking purification process plus leading-edge building approach will attack the plastic waste crisis and connect brands with sustainable plastic faster.
Having this digital vision and its mission in recycling has helped attract young people to the company to continue to drive the mission.
The information strategy integrates process automation, maintenance, engineering, business network, HSSE, and operations with a common Data Lake to enable artificial intelligence to turn these vast data sources into information for faster & better decision making.
ARC Advisory Group’s Andy Chatha noted that today only 5% of plastics are recycled, so companies like PureCycle Technologies are
helping drive greater sustainability over time. Visit the PureCycle Technologies website for more on their mission and progress.
