Geoff, please start by sharing a bit about your journey and how you got involved in the sustainability sector.
My career spans nearly 40 years, with 26 of those working for the Environment Agency – the primary environmental regulator in the United Kingdom. My life in the Agency included science and research management, policy, strategy, and operations. In this latter role, I was responsible for regulating the waste management sector and infrastructure, such as incinerators and landfills. What surprised me was that so little was being done about plastic recycling, with so much material heading for energy recovery.
I left the Agency in 2014 to become a sustainability consultant. I joined up with my good friend Jo Ruxton MBE, who had started the UK’s first plastic pollution charity, Plastic Oceans, now called Ocean Generation. While working here, I got interested in the state of plastic pollution and its impacts on marine life and our health. Following the release of our film, A Plastic Ocean, I led policy and technical solution-focused projects for the charity, and that’s how I became involved with Mura Technology.
What exactly does your role at Mura Technology entail?
My role as Head of Sustainability is to ensure we can demonstrate how Mura’s Hydro-PRT advanced plastic recycling technology delivers important benefits for the circular materials economy and climate through industrial-scale decarbonization of the plastics value chain. This is important for policymakers and the product and packaging value chain, which needs confidence in their LCAs.
Part of my role is commissioning science projects with our fantastic research partners, the Universities of Warwick and Ghent, where we generate new data that underpins our technology development and deployment at an industrial scale. The research includes generating data for Life Cycle Assessments of Mura’s process and evaluating a wider range of polymers that Hydro-PRT could process.
Can you explain Mura’s core technology and services, particularly how Hydro-PRT works and its potential to transform plastic waste management?
Mura has developed Hydro-PRT, an advanced (sometimes called ‘chemical’) recycling technology for processing waste plastics that are not considered recyclable via traditional mechanical processes and would otherwise go to incineration, landfill, or leak into the environment. These plastics are post-consumer (and so are considered contaminated), multi-layered, flexible, and rigid materials, so films are a prime example, alongside packaging such as yogurt pots and ready-meal trays.
Our first site will be operational in the UK in 2024 and will take waste from the UK, which means that in addition to diverting it into recycling, it will also be prevented from being exported. The waste for this site arrives in bales, which must be prepared via a series of process steps, including shredding and glass, metals, and non-target plastics removal. The mix is then heated and pressurized in an extruder and fed into the conversion unit. Our use of supercritical water as the agent of change makes us unique in the market – it breaks the carbon-carbon bonds in the plastic, donates hydrogen, and forms shorter-chain, stable circular hydrocarbon products that are sold to the petrochemical industry as a drop-in replacement for fossil oil.
The process creates a circular economy for plastic and replaces the use of fossil resources to manufacture new, virgin-grade plastics. It’s also inherently scalable, as the supercritical water surrounds the waste plastic. Mura’s first site in Teesside, Northeast England, will place 20,000 tonnes of liquid hydrocarbons onto the market annually.
Mura is developing several other sites in Europe, the USA, and Southeast Asia and sells licenses to the technology through our Global Licensing partner, preferred engineering partner, and investor, KBR. By 2032, Mura aims to have 1.5 million tonnes of advanced recycling capacity in development and operation.
How does Mura Technology contribute to sustainability in the broader recycling industry, and what role does data transparency play in building trust?
Coming from the NGO and regulatory sectors, I am passionate about building trust in Mura’s process and the benefits it can bring as we come to a commercial scale.
Advanced recycling technologies have shown immense promise in diverting plastic waste from landfills and incineration and reintegrating it into the production cycle, thereby mitigating the environmental impact of plastic consumption. Yet, despite their potential, these technologies have to earn the complete trust and confidence of regulatory bodies, non-governmental organizations, and consumers. We want to overcome this challenge.
Mura has set out four principles for the sector, drawing support from the entire value chain. Foremost of these are access to high-quality data relevant to LCA and independent verification of these data. We have done this by providing data to studies conducted by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the Consumer Goods Forum. However, we know that responsible value chain members will need to conduct their own LCA and need confidence in any inventory data they use. That’s why we have worked closely with WMG at the University of Warwick and Innovate UK to generate the independent LCA model and, importantly, working with ecoinvent to conduct its peer review and incorporation into their Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) to support broad adoption.
We believe this partnership with ecoinvent enables commercial sustainability companies and their customers to use the data confidently. Moreover, we have agreed to continually update our data within ecoinvent as we develop the technology further and deploy it globally.
In your experience, what are the most significant data challenges faced by experts in your field, and how does Mura overcome them?
In generating models, we often work with design characteristics and expected loads; however, these need to be checked against the actual operation of the plant. We will likely see less energy consumption from some of the processes, such as the waste feed machinery not having to be worked at ‘normal’ operating speeds, to match the process flow of the Hydro-PRT plant. Overcoming these data challenges requires monitoring steady state operations over reasonable periods – which is crucial in providing our product off-takers with carbon intensity values for their Scope 3 assessments.
Moreover, LCA has a sense of false precision—it’s never that simple. For example, grid carbon intensity varies hourly, yet we always use annual averages. We are becoming aware that expressing carbon intensity as a range may be more informative to stakeholders. Above all, we should be open about this and develop a better understanding across the sustainability community about how best to calculate and interpret the values we generate.
