Every year the world produces hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic waste, yet only the clean, high-purity fraction can be handled by mechanical recycling. For everything else, plastic disposal is far from simple. Multi-layer composite packaging, food containers stained with grease, and mixed household waste combining different resins are low-value plastics that account for nearly half of all plastic waste. Because they are costly to sort and difficult to reuse, most have long ended up in incinerators or landfills. How can they be recycled efficiently? That is the central challenge facing the global plastic waste recycling industry.

Mechanical recycling works by melting plastic and reforming it into pellets. It demands a great deal from the feedstock, which must be a single resin, clean and consistent in colour. Once impurities enter, the performance of the recycled material drops noticeably. Conventional mechanical recycling can therefore cover only a limited range of plastic types. Closing that gap requires chemical recycling. Unlike mechanical recycling, pyrolysis breaks the polymer chains of plastics in an oxygen-free or low-oxygen environment and returns them to small molecules or monomers, resolving the problems of mixed and contaminated feedstocks at the molecular level. Pyrolysis itself is not a new technology. The real difficulty lies in turning it into industrial equipment that operates reliably over the long term. Batch units are inherently weak in feed sealing, temperature control and anti-polymerisation, which makes it hard to hold stable throughput and emissions. What the industry needs is fully continuous pyrolysis: feedstock fed in continuously, products discharged continuously, with the plant running in long cycles under safe and environmentally responsible conditions.

Niutech has dedicated nearly four decades to pyrolysis technology. Its self-developed industrial continuous waste plastic pyrolysis production line accepts single or mixed plastics, including PP, PE, PS, ABS and nylon. The design is guided by the company’s own “process + structure” philosophy. Key variables such as heating temperature, heat-transfer area, operating pressure and residence time were tested and systemised, then combined with more than ten thousand technical parameters accumulated from real projects. The result is a plant that runs continuously and stably over the long term. Feedstock enters the line without complex washing, sorting or drying, and is cracked in one efficient step into plastic pyrolysis products.

On this line, waste plastic is turned into pyrolysis oil. This plastic-to-oil conversion gives the recycled oil two roles: it can be burned on site as industrial fuel, or further processed along the petrochemical chain into feedstocks for higher-value products. Projects using Niutech technology have already obtained ISCC and other international certifications, and the route has matured into a proven plastic recycling solution that closes the loop from waste plastic back to new plastic. Non-condensable gas produced by the line is reused by the equipment itself, lowering running energy costs. Niutech’s equipment has been exported to dozens of countries and regions across Asia, Europe, South America and North America. In 2026, the company also signed a sales contract with a global energy major for its industrial continuous waste plastic pyrolysis production line. The equipment will upgrade a large refinery, giving it full capacity from pyrolysis oil to hydrotreated sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The fact that a customer with exacting feedstock standards chose this route speaks to the reliability of Niutech’s technology.