Israel's largest refinery and petrochemicals group, Bazan, said on Sunday it bought a local recycled-plastics producer and has partnered to build two recycling plants to reach a target of using 15% recycled plastics by 2025.
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Bazan, formerly called Oil Refineries, said it bought control of VPM Plast, which specializes in post-industrial recycling, in a deal that valued the company at 40 million shekels ($12 million).
Bazan also said it was partnering with two groups to build a facility that will sort, rinse and grind up to 10,000 tons of household plastic waste a year and a second, advanced plant that uses a chemical process to recycle plastic that otherwise would have been burned or buried.
In April 2021, a top-level government committee in the Prime Minister's Office recommended on that Bazan Group's oil refineries in the Haifa Bay be shuttered within no longer than a decade.
The move to shutter Bazan's facilities in Haifa Bay and its oil storage complex in nearby Kiryat Haim, as well as the transfer of Haifa Chemicals, a fertilizer plant, from there to the Negev desert in the south, should be pursued "as soon as possible, and within no more than a decade," the panel stated.
Haifa residents, plagued by significant air pollution and above-average incidences of cancer and respiratory disease, have been campaigning for years to shut the complex down.
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