The Paraxylene Gap Was Never the Problem

Thirteen months ago, Anellotech and R Plus Japan put out a release saying the Plas-TCat process was moving into its commercialization phase.

The last line of the commercial section read: "Commercial plant discussions are now underway with motivated feedstock, offtake, and operating partners."

That was 24 July 2025.

On 26 August 2026, C&EN reported that the company has filed for a form of bankruptcy in Texas and hired Development Specialists, Inc. to sell the pilot plant, the intellectual property, and the business interests.

DSI and Anellotech both declined to say why.

The usual read on a cleantech liquidation is that the market never showed up.

That read does not survive ten minutes with the trade data.

"If the gap you were built to fill got wider every year, what actually killed you?"

The demand side did what the pitch deck said it would

Anellotech's own site still carries the sentence that framed the whole venture: there is "a significant opportunity in the PET market, where no renewable bio-paraxylene is currently available."

Set that against what the US paraxylene position has done (chart below).

In 2017 the United States shipped out $957 million of paraxylene and brought in $310 million. Comfortable net exporter, and the customs value on the import side was the smallest it has been in the last decade.

Then 2022. Imports $1,084 million against exports $1,083 million, a dead heat, and the first time the flows crossed.

They have not crossed back. 2023 ran $1,434 million in against $816 million out, and 2024 was $1,558 million against $796 million, a $762 million gap in a single year.

Both sides came down hard in 2025, to $725 million and $532 million, and imports still led.

One caveat, and it is a real one: the chart is customs value. Comtrade's aggregate net-weight field comes back null or zero for the US import side in 2016 and again across 2020 through 2023, so the tonnage series is unusable and nothing here should be read as a volume trend.

The direction is not in doubt though. Over the same nine years Anellotech was running loblolly pine and then mixed plastic through a half-tonne-a-day reactor in Silsbee, the country it was doing it in went from selling paraxylene to buying it.