Modern-day alchemy: mining oil from plastic waste in rural Korea

SEOUL, July 16 (UPI) -- Call it modern-day alchemy: a technology that extracts oil from discarded plastic and plastic film, in a factory with no smokestack, not even a wisp of smoke -- and now, improbably, in commercial operation in a quiet rural corner of South Korea. It is hard to picture, precisely because it is hard to believe.

Nothing is burned, so no smoke rises; at the end of the process, the oil simply pours out. The plant takes in some 24 tons of waste plastic a day, and recovers oil equal to roughly 70% of that weight - a high yield by the industry's standards.

Korea developed and commercialized what is billed as the world's first such process -- one its makers say exists nowhere in the United States, Europe or Japan. And it sits, not in a gleaming industrial park, but in a modest countryside factory in Jeongeup, North Jeolla Province, run by a handful of workers.

That so improbable a thing should happen there strains belief, yet buyers fly in from Britain and Saudi Arabia, and the plant's entire annual output, up to some 4,550 tons of recycled feedstock, is already contracted to Trafigura, one of the world's largest commodity traders, based in Singapore.

The principle is surprisingly simple, much like a microwave oven, whose waves heat only the food inside the dish. It's obvious enough, once explained. Yet, reaching that answer took two generations and 45 years of dogged, single-minded research -- and a small Korean firm that finally got there.

This is the story of Dosi Yujeon -- "City Oil Field" -- in Jeongeup dates to 1980 and the National Land Life-Science Research Institute, founded by Jung Heung-je.

His insight was that heated ceramic beads give off a kind of wave energy that snaps the long carbon chains of heavy oil -- the thick fuel that powers ships -- into lighter, cleaner oil and reduces marine pollution into the bargain.

Years later, a pyrolysis firm, which wrings oil from waste by heating it, brought him a stubborn problem: Its recycled oil kept hardening into a waxy, paraffin-like solid. Could the same ceramic beads solve it? The question led Jung to a far larger challenge: how to apply the method to waste plastic.

As the company describes it, that same wave energy severs the carbon chains of plastic, in a sealed catalytic reactor and turns them tino vapor. The vapor, once cooled to a liquid state, becomes heavy oil. Refined again, it splits into a light-oil-grade fuel and a naphtha-grade feedstock.

The company reports that carbon emissions and toxins, such as dioxins, are held to a minimum. Plastic was created out of naphtha, a petroleum product, in the first place; here the process is reversed and the circle of the raw material closed at last.

The father's work was passed on to his son, Jung Young-hoon, now the company's chief executive. He was bent on loosening the country's dependence on fossil fuels.

He joined the work in the mid-2000s, began developing the technology in 2008 and founded Dosi Yujeon in 2015. Even then, some 15 years of testing and demonstration were required before the firm earned NET --New Excellent Technology -- certification from the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy in 2021 and attained exportability.

The NET seal marks promising home-grown technologies early and lets the government vouch for them. A process dazzling enough to invite the word "alchemy" drew exacting scrutiny. The vetting, by all accounts, was demanding. Within the industry, the leap is likened to the automobile's passage from the combustion engine to the electric car.

Of the oil extracted, the heavy grade fuels ships, the light grade becomes industrial fuel, and the ultra-light grade turns into naphtha feedstock for new plastic. It is as if a working oil field had risen in Jeongeup, a small Korean city where not a drop of crude is pumped from the ground.

As word spread, the curious arrived from one country after another. Some disbelieving Europeans brought their own plastic waste, loaded the processing chamber and hunkered down before it for a day, then two, watching plastic turn to oil with no flame at all. They then carried the product home in drums to test it, half-suspecting some sleight of hand.

The company presents the process as an environmental achievement in its own right, disposing of waste plastic without leaving pollutants behind. Conventional methods, it argues, cannot do that: incineration, landfill and high-heat pyrolysis all leave soot and fumes - burning brings smoke and the complaints of neighbors, while burial leaves plastic unrotted for centuries, poisoning the soil.

The Dosi Yujeon process runs below 300 degrees Celsius -- far cooler than the 400 to 700 degrees required by conventional pyrolysis -- and, the firm says, gives off no dioxins and needs no auxiliary fuel, since nothing is set alight.

It needs no pre-sorting, and its automated line safeguards worker safety and efficiency. It suits, too, a world betting heavily on renewable energy leading toward carbon neutrality. Demand, as the years pass, would appear set to surge.

To be fair, the value and viability of the process is far from settled. Chemical recycling of this kind remains contested terrain.

A number of jurisdictions, California among them, decline to count it as recycling at all; critics note that such processes can be energy-hungry, that their output is often burned as fuel rather than reborn as plastic, and that more than a few ventures have promised industrial scale only to fall short.

Independent life-cycle studies divide on whether the climate benefit is real or marginal, and even at home the commercial case is unproven, with skeptical investors asking whether the technology can hold its own against far larger rivals.

The fair conclusion is not that the argument is over, but that Dosi Yujeon has done more than most to earn a hearing -- clearing certification at home and abroad, from the government's NET seal to the international ISCC PLUS standard and securing a real buyer rather than the mere promise of one.

No one can say how far this technology will travel. But this much seems certain: Born of a formidable, single-minded tenacity, it will not stand alone for long. A second such firm will follow, and a third.

The own hope is simply that innovators keep training the microscope on the remote and the overlooked, turning up more such innovators -- and letting them do the world some good.

Nohsok Choi is the former chief editor of the Kyunghyang ShinmuChoin and former Paris correspondent. He serves as president of the Kyunghyang Shinmun Alumni Association, president of the Korean Media & Culture Forum and CEO of the YouTube channel One World TV. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

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This story was originally published July 15, 2026 at 11:51 PM.