Harmonizing music and circularity

The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival has a 50-year tradition of celebrating music, food and the history of the region bringing thousands of people from around the world together for 8 days of outstanding music and mouth-watering local fare. Shell USA, Inc. has been working with the Festival for the last four years to design and deploy a sustainability program to help divert as much waste as we can, with help from the 450,000 Festival attendees, generated at the event from landfill.

Shell Polymers is committed to supporting the circular economy by advancing technologies that revolutionize the lifespan of polymers, aiming to create a closed-loop system where plastic molecules cycle from manufacture to use and then reuse. All of which helps to keep events like the New Orleans Jazz Fest iconic and memorable.

Getting more plastic back into the supply chain

Our goal is to help divert used plastic from landfills by finding more and better ways to collect, clean and sort plastics. We seek out sources of plastic, such as agricultural field film, that are difficult to bring into to existing collection systems. Leveraging the advanced recycling end market, we help to develop methods for cleaning and collecting these hard-to-recycle plastics.

We’re also investing in new technologies that improve the existing collection and sortation system, so all recycled plastics can reach the most suitable end market for their application. Finding ways to bring in more hard-to-recycle plastics and improving the collection and sortation system are necessary for diverting more used plastic from landfills.

Our (real)ationship with Nexus Circular

A crucial element of our circular economy strategy is our partnership with Nexus Circular, a company specializing in advanced recycling technologies. Nexus Circular plays a vital role in collecting and processing discarded plastics from homes, businesses, and events like the New Orleans Jazz Fest, that would otherwise end up in landfills.

Once the plastic is collected, Nexus Circular then sorts and shreds it before turning the plastics into an oil, using an innovative advanced recycling technology called pyrolysis. This is a process that converts the recycled plastic back into its hydrocarbon molecular building blocks, producing a liquid feedstock (pyrolysis oil) that can be used to replace fossil raw materials in the production of new materials.

From oil to everyday products

The pyrolysis oil is then transported to Shell's Norco plant in Louisiana. This is where the magic truly happens, as the oil is converted into circular ethylene, and through mass balancing, this circular attribution is applied to the polymer production at our Shell Polymers facility in Monaca. The result? A fully certified circular polymer that has thousands of applications in everyday life, from packaging and consumer goods to automotive parts and construction materials, enabling countless end markets to replace virgin raw materials with recycled plastics.

However, our commitment to the circular economy extends beyond advanced recycling. We employ processes that reduce waste generation and ensure the scrap and offcut wastes from our own operations are recycled. And we help our customers to reduce waste to landfill by working to develop grades that are recyclable, while our Tech Service team supports our customers’ efforts to minimize plastic use, by thin-walling, lightweighting, downgauging – to make their plastic parts thinner and lighter.

Our hope is that our efforts, along with those of other organizations, are helping to pave the way for a future where plastic is not a problem, but a valuable part of a circular economy.