Partner Spotlight: Interview with Dr. Geoff Brighty of Mura Technology

 
Mura’s Hydro-PRT® technology transforms hard-to-recycle plastics into high-quality, fossil-replacement hydrocarbons for industry, helping close the circular economy loop. Yet, as the sector grows, one of its most significant challenges remains the need for trustworthy, transparent data to guide decision-making and build confidence in new technologies. Mura’s collaboration with ecoinvent is central to ensuring the credibility and transparency of its advanced recycling process. By integrating ecoinvent’s independently verified datasets into its Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs), Mura can provide stakeholders with high-quality, trusted data that supports the sustainability benefits of their proprietary technology.
 
In this interview, Dr. Geoff Brighty, Head of Sustainability and R&D at Mura, discusses how the company’s partnership with ecoinvent is helping to drive the industry’s transition to a circular economy and set a new benchmark for transparency and data integrity in the sector.

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.

How has Mura integrated ecoinvent data into its sustainability practices, and how does this support the company’s work?
 
The LCA model developed by WMG at the University of Warwick was published in an academic journal in 2023 – but we realized that commercial companies could not use the data in their client’s models because the data outputs had not been incorporated into a reliable LCI. One company then recommended that we engage directly with ecoinvent as they used their LCI.
 
We approached ecoinvent to see whether the data set – a first for advanced recycling – would be suitable for critical review and incorporation into the next ecoinvent database release, and we then embarked on a partnership approach.
 
Mura now uses ecoinvent datasets in LCAs for all of its sites, using OpenLCA as the modeling platform.

Why is accurate data critical for the future of plastics recycling, and how can it drive more sustainable practices across the industry?
 
As a new and energy-intensive sector, advanced recycling has already been challenged as not being sustainable from the outset.
 
Accurate data helps drive a complementary approach in plastic waste management, providing clear evidence to all stakeholders that waste material is being directed to the most appropriate processing technology. This will ensure we process as much plastic as possible, minimize carbon emissions, and generate low-carbon recycled oils for technically demanding products such as food-grade packaging and automotive components.

Can you share some insights into your experience collaborating with the ecoinvent team?
 
It’s been brilliant. Nikolia Stoikou, Project Manager at ecoinvent, has guided us through the assessment process and project status, holding meetings at regular intervals to exchange data and questions. We learned a lot from the process and gathered more data, including the carbon intensity of the actual plant build, to create a holistic view.

What are the key advantages of sharing your sustainability data with an organization like ecoinvent?
 
Firstly, it’s about provenance and confidence in the published datasets, following ecoinvent’s rigorous approach to quality assurance. It was equally important for Mura to have our data assessed this way.
 
Secondly, it’s about dissemination and uptake. Our data, published by a trusted source in ecoinvent, helps brands explore for the first time what advanced recycling can do to support their efforts on circularity and simultaneously reduce carbon intensity. This, in turn, enables companies to build sustainable business cases to meet their ESG targets.

Looking ahead, what projects or initiatives is the Mura team particularly excited about in the near future?
 
Our Hydro-PRT process design continues to evolve, scaling from the first plant’s 20,000 annual tonne capacity to 50,000 annual tonnes of product output. We are excited about increasing the size of our plants and generating greater efficiencies, which will increase product yield and further reduce the carbon footprints of our future projects in Europe, the US, and Southeast Asia.

What do you foresee as the biggest challenges facing the sustainability of plastic recycling over the next decade?
 
Plastics Europe estimates that more than 12 million tonnes of plastic waste were incinerated in 2020 [1], emitting over 27 million tonnes of CO2e [2]. Yet plastic is a valuable resource that can be recycled and used in a circular economy.
 
The plastic recycling challenge is now coming to a head with more of a ‘top-down’ approach to production, consumption, and recycling. The UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee aims to conclude a Global Treaty on plastic pollution in South Korea in November 2024. The Treaty will require practical, scalable solutions to these connected challenges to stop plastic pollution, reduce carbon emissions, and retain fossil carbon in a circular material economy. Individual countries are already improving their legislation to deliver these outcomes, such as the new EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulations and its targets set to come in from 2030.
 
We will, therefore, need the broadest range of solutions to address these challenges and get technologies such as advanced recycling to scale.

What is the most important outcome of Mura Technology’s work for the future of plastics recycling?
 
If we are to solve the plastic challenge, recycling at scale remains an important objective. Mura aims to create a 1.5 million-tonne supply of sustainable hydrocarbon feedstocks by 2032. This will deliver recycled content for brands placing packaging on the market. By diverting that material away from incineration, we will also avoid over 2.5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. Circularity and decarbonization must go hand in hand.
 
I think it’s important to remember that alongside the very sobering facts about plastic entering the environment and CO2 emissions increasing year on year, it’s valuable to note that from a resource point of view, it is estimated that 8.4 billion barrels of oil will be needed annually to support plastic production by 2060 [3]. Our process uses a ready resource—plastic waste—to replace the need for virgin fossil oil.

How does Mura’s internal culture reflect its commitment to sustainability, and how does that shape the company’s approach to its work?


 
Sustainability is a core value. Mura focuses on recycling—not recovering for fuel—the plastic waste that would otherwise be sent to incineration. If we scale up, we can start turning off the fossil oil-to-plastics tap and derive a new circular economy.

What advice would you give to other companies in your sector about ensuring the availability and credibility of sustainability data?
 
Companies must go the extra mile to ensure their sustainability data are independently reviewed and reported so stakeholders can trust them—we can’t mark our own homework!
 
Working with ecoinvent has helped demonstrate the provenance of our data to value chain partners and NGOs. It has also reassured us that we can be confident in how we have developed and interpreted our LCAs and presented our sustainability credentials publicly.

Finally, where can our readers connect with you and other Mura Technology experts?
 
The Mura team regularly attends waste, recycling, and chemicals conferences globally. Please come to our stand or approach us if we are speaking. The next major conference is the Nova Institute in Cologne, November 20th-21st, 2024, where I’ll be speaking.

[1] The Circular Economy for Plastics: A European Overview (2022)
[2] Ozoemena, M., and Coles, S. C., Journal of Polymers and the Environment (2023)
[3] Statista (2019)