Eastman has been enhancing the quality of life in a material way for more than 100 years. With 14,000 global employees, our four reporting segments include Advanced Materials, Additives & Functional Products, Chemical Intermediates, and Fibers. Our innovative solutions are showing the world what's possible, whether that means making your food safer, everyday products more sustainable, or inner layers that lighten electric vehicles and improve their range.
We're working hard to mitigate climate change and are committed to being carbon neutral by 2050. We have innovative products that will grow as the world decarbonizes. The Wall Street Journal and Barron's both named us one of the world's most sustainably managed companies, and we were listed in the top 25 of the 2021 Fortune Change the World list. Eastman is a leader in the circular economy. We're on track to complete the world's largest polyester molecular recycling facility by the end of 2022.
When you think about our employees, generations have been part of the Eastman family. We have accelerated our commitment to inclusion and diversity and constantly earn honors as a top employer. We were named one of the world's most ethical companies for the seventh time. Our employees and our company have proven to be resilient during difficult and tough times.
We've also transformed from within by strengthening our execution capabilities and improving our cost structure, and we're making digital products to meet customer needs for the 21st century. COREfra is a digital platform that helps our customers improve the accuracy and efficiency of film cutting for paint protection film. We've come a long way since George Eastman founded our company as part of Kodak in 1920, and we're looking forward to showing you how much farther we plan to go.
Good morning, and good afternoon, good evening for people who are joining us virtually around the world. It's great to have a live audience. I gotta say it's exciting. First time I'm presenting to not a camera. This is a great way to launch getting back to normal. We have an exciting day today to cover around where we are in our strategy and the value that we think we're gonna create. Before we get started, there's the obligatory forward-looking statements. Please read that. I'm gonna introduce our executive team who are here today and very interested and eager to meet with all of you. I'm gonna start with William McLean, as most of you know, our CFO. We have our two. I'm gonna ask them all to stand up at once when we're done.
There are our two P&L leaders. We have Brad Lich, who runs our Advanced Materials and Fibers business, as well as our Chief Commercial Officer. We have Lucian Boldea, who is running our Additives & Functional Products business and CI as well as procurement. We have our Executive Vice President of Technology as well as our CSO, Steve Crawford. We have Mark Cox, who runs our Manufacturing. We have Perry Stuckey, who's our Chief Human Resource Officer. Julie McAlindon, who you just saw wrap up our video, who is our Head of Transformation, Supply Chain, and our regions. We also have a number of our members of our senior leadership team, in particular our business leaders, here available to talk to you on the breaks. If all of you could stand up, please.
I should also mention Kellye Walker, obviously a member of our team, but she couldn't make it today, and she certainly wishes she could be here. With that. Oh, Chris Killian too. I forgot Chris. There we go, Chris. A number of people are here, and we're really excited about this. I'm gonna kick this off with an overview of our strategy, the progress we're making on it, and how that translates into value creation for our customers as well as our shareholders. Steve will dive into the innovation sustainability section, and spend some time talking about how we bring our growth model to life, particular emphasis on the circular economy as well as what we're doing on the ESG front, particularly the carbon footprint front.
After that, Brad will then hit on how we're building on a decade of very impressive growth in Advanced Materials and how we're gonna accelerate that growth going forward with the specialty work that we have going on as well as the circular economy as an accelerant. Lucian will then cover the new AFP, a more focused AFP, and how we're driving growth from that business as another great specialty business and talk about some of the actions we are taking to continue to improve and stabilize our CI segment. Willie will bring it all together from a financial point of view, and then we'll have Q&A. There'll be a 20-minute break as well, just before, just between Brad and Lucian. Now today we're gonna be focused on long-term value creation. Obviously it's a chaotic time.
There's lots of things going on in the short term, but we're not gonna be trying to get into that today. Just to get that aspect out of the way, I would tell you that the fourth quarter guide is still a range that we believe in, and that the guide that we gave you around 2022 in the third quarter call is one that we continue to believe is directionally accurate. Obviously, a lot of uncertainty to next year, but, presuming those underlying assumptions exist, we still think that's an accurate look at 2022. With that said, we're gonna move on to how we create value over the next three years and beyond as we go through this presentation. All right.
First it's always helpful to start with a little bit of, you know, look back at what have we achieved since our last Investor Day, which was back in February 2018, and we've accomplished a lot. It's hard to see it sometimes because we've had a few things get in the way, like a global trade war, a pandemic, and then a supply chain crisis with rapid inflation. Through all of it, we've been incredibly. My slides are out of control. We've been incredibly successful in what we've been able to achieve. When you look at the new business revenue growth from innovation, from our growth programs, $1.5 billion, that's a real testament to the strength of our value proposition, even in difficult times, and key to allowing us to grow faster than the underlying markets, offsetting some of the headwinds that we faced.
We've also made tremendous progress in a very short time frame around the circular economy platforms. I'm really excited to talk about how that progress builds into a lot of value creation as we look forward. We've made aggressive commitments last year in our sustainability report about what we're gonna achieve in reducing our carbon footprint and the impact on climate, getting carbon neutrality by 2050. More importantly, a very detailed plan about how to get one-third down by 2030, which puts us on an incredible glide slope to get there. We've invested a lot in our capabilities. It's great to have a strategy, great to have a lot of innovation, but if you can't execute it, convert it to orders, and translate the value at the bottom line, it doesn't really matter. We continue to always keep our eye on building those capabilities to succeed.
We've generated significant amount of cash in this company and will continue to do so, and being incredibly disciplined in how we've deployed it. We've been responsible in how we've managed our portfolio, divesting two non-strategic businesses that have better owners than us. We've looked at every aspect of who we are from top-line growth through how we manage our employees to how we manage our environmental footprint and embed ESG in everything that we do, and we think we're a leader in this space from that direction. A lot is going on in the company. As you think about value creation going forward, we wanna leave you with five key themes on what we think are the hallmark of what Eastman's been doing, what's gonna do going forward, and how it's gonna create value for all of you.
Now, some of these themes have been around since 2018, and some are new. It starts with our innovation-driven growth model. You will hear this to the point where you don't wanna hear it anymore, but that is the heart of who we are and how we win in the marketplace every day. Then, of course, we have this entirely new additional vector of growth in the circular economy that we're very excited about. More importantly, our brands are very excited about what we can do for them. We continue to make investments and strengthen our execution capability to drive the top line and translate it to the bottom line. As I said, we're embedding ESG in everything that we do.
When you put these four together, we generate a lot of cash, and we're gonna continue to have a very disciplined and balanced approach to how we deploy it. You're gonna hear that from me as I double-click on each of these themes, you know, to give you a high-level overview, and then you're gonna see these themes throughout the rest of the presentations today. Let's start with the first one, which is the innovation-driven growth model. This is not a new concept. We talked about it a lot in 2018, and we've been investing in this idea since 2014. Once we've fully integrated the significant acquisitions we did to upgrade our portfolio with Eastman, we then consolidated our efforts and our focus really on driving organic growth from this very attractive portfolio of businesses.
It is working, it's delivering significant value, and it will accelerate as we go forward. In addition to that, as I said, we're also focused on sustainability. What you're gonna see is a focus on disruptive trends in the sustainability side of the macro economy that's driving pretty much all of our growth these days. That translates into high-value growth from these products. That's a mixed upgrade that's important in understanding our economics. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on the growth model, but I do wanna spend a little bit just to frame it because you're gonna see it through the different presentations today as Steve, Brad, Lucian bring it to life.
The model starts with these three links, and the first link about world-class technology is fundamental to who Eastman was, you know, all the way back to our birth as a company to who we are today. We believe that we should only be in places where we have world-class technology platforms, which means we have advantaged R&D, advantaged application development to innovate far quicker than our direct competitors, as well as scale, both in our connection to the marketplace and our operations to win against any competition that we see in the marketplace and accelerate our growth. That's fundamental, but that by itself doesn't work. In the old days, it would work. It was a field of dreams. You could build it, they come. Now we know that we have to relentlessly engage in the marketplace to drive that growth from innovation.
It's not just our direct customers. We know we have to be engaged with them and not just in procurement, but in R&D and the P&L, where we ensure that our innovation is of value to them and how they think about us helping them win. We realize we have to play forward. Play forward down to the brands, play forward down to the retail channel, where we can demonstrate the value creation we can bring to them, and that allows us to have more insight on innovation as well as create market pull for our product through the value chain. Those two in themselves sound great, but still not enough, right? The secret sauce to Eastman is actually the application development capability in the middle here that link these two things together, and that's essential to our success.
AD, which you'll hear a lot about today, is how we can actually do what our customers do. We can prototype a product with our materials in it and show them how we create value in their product, and we have all the testing capability that they use to validate that it is creating the value that they want. We can use that to demonstrate to our direct customers, to our brands, to the channel of what we can do. It allows us to accelerate innovation, allows us to know our value and make sure we price and get what we deserve.
Now, these three links are great, but they also have to have a foundation underneath of them. It starts with, you know, advantaged significant scale and integration that gives us a competitive advantage as a foundational capability, combined with the capability investments we're making across the company, combined with disciplined portfolio management, so that we are sure that we're focusing on where we can create value. You put all that together, that's great. Where are you gonna point this engine? Well, you gotta figure that out too. When you think about the world we live in today, there are three crises that we're focused on. The first, and we've been focused on this for decades, is there's an emerging middle class around the world that deserves a higher quality of life, and it's a growing population.
There's a lot to be done in innovating better materials and advancing the development of the world. On top of that, especially in the last decade, much more awareness of climate, and we're all committed to doing everything we can to reduce our impact, both directly on our operations and what our products can enable our customers and consumers to do in reducing their carbon footprint. In the last three years, even more awareness around plastic waste, which is a serious problem, both for the waste and the climate associated with it, that we need to address. When you look at these three things, and when you think about Eastman, we have sustainability occurring across all of these challenges. We think of it as the Triple Challenge, because while you're solving these problems, you can't just solve one, right?
No one wants to give up their quality of life as we address climate and plastic waste. You have to solve all three at the same time, and that creates significant innovation opportunities for us. Otherwise, you can't solve these problems. What you see is we have innovation happening everywhere throughout the company on these themes. It starts with our long-term history, where we've been focused on caring for society with a heavy emphasis on health and wellness, so we're bringing BPA-free, styrene-free polymers to the marketplace. We're replacing antibiotics with organic acids in animal feed. We have low VOC coating additives, and we make much more durable products. We enable durability in many of the products that obviously extends their life and reduces the, you know, improves the quality, also helps climate. We also have a lot going on in climate.
We have products for, especially for cars, especially for EVs, that lightweight glass that improve thermal management and the draw on HVAC. We have energy efficiency projects that we're doing around building and construction in homes and buildings. Of course, durability continues to come up as an important theme in the reduce, reuse, recycle theme of what we should be doing in the environment. Circular is a big opportunity, with our two molecular recycling technologies and the fact that our cellulosic biopolymers can also be tuned to biodegrade in a variety of different applications. We'll be spending a lot of time on that third column. When you think about this, we're succeeding on this. This isn't just an idea. It's not just platforms. They're actually converting to commercial orders. New business revenue from innovation, just innovation, you know, is on track and doing really well.
We're on track to doing about $600 million this year, which is well above our target range. Some of that's catching up from last year, but a lot of it is just the momentum we have in our specialties as well as our circular activities. You'll see from Steve that 100% of these programs and our top programs all connect to at least one of the sustainability drivers. It's important to remember that when these are growing, these are very high margin compared to the company average and even the segment averages inside AM and AFP, so you're getting a significant mix upgrade. Mix is important.
You know, it's how we drive our company, and we talked about this in 2018, and I want to bring the slide back and talk about it now because it is fundamental to who we are. When we're growing AM and AFP, you know, faster than a normalized CI, you're valuing the mix up. Importantly, inside AM and AFP, and you'll hear these stories from Brad and Lucian, we're dramatically growing high-value products in those segments that have much higher margins inside those segments. That's part of how we deliver so much growth within AM and what AFP will continue and really accelerate doing with their growth programs.
When you look at it on a corporate basis on the right-hand side, what you see is tremendous variable margin growth in the mountain chart of AM and AFP growing dramatically over the last decade. You can see the role that mix playing in it, which is that red line where the unit variable margin has doubled in the last decade as we've continued to improve our mix. In the beginning, that was partly done through the divestiture of commodities and the acquisition of specialties, and then it was accelerated through the organic investments and growth that we've been delivering since 2014. Scale and integration, as I mentioned earlier, is critical to our success. The scale that we have as a company level enables us to win in innovation.
It allows us to have advantage, fundamental R&D and local capabilities, application capabilities that our competitors cannot afford. That gives us a huge advantage. It also allows us to mix technologies on horizontal integration. Steve will cover this, but when we have multi-technology platforms, we're world-class. Our margins are on average 2x a single technology. Significant value creation for that. Of course, the vertical integration gives us additional advantages. It's out now. It's critical to our innovation now around circular, leveraging all that infrastructure and expertise that we've developed to enable all of the circular platforms that we're pursuing. It, of course, gives you a stabilized earnings position when you look at the value across the chain and a very advantaged cost position.
When you put all that together, it translates to more top-line growth, it translates to better margins, and importantly, translates to a lot of cash flow that funds all the growth in the specialties, as well as our ability to return a significant amount of cash to shareholders. The second theme is, okay, that's a great strategy, and that strategy in itself, I think is, you know, incredibly compelling. You can add to it with the circular economy. Here we've got brands highly engaged with setting aggressive targets on recycled content and addressing the plastic waste problem, as well as, you know, aggressive targets on climate. At the same time, they don't wanna give up the quality of their products on the shelf at all. We provide solutions where that can be done with our two molecular recycling technologies.
In addition to the recycling technology, there are applications where recycling isn't really an option, think food service or microbeads in cosmetics, and tunable biodegradation of our cellulose polymers have now got very significant interest. That's an additional vector just on top of the recycling. This all comes together in ways we can solve these serious challenges and, as you'll see, provide very attractive returns to our owners at the same time. I'm gonna start with the polyester renewal technology, which is also methanolysis, and that's very compelling. It's a very compelling technology, and it's not a new idea to us. We've had 30 years of practice and experience at Eastman of using this technology. It's not a lab experiment or a startup. That's incredibly important to the brands because they want reliable supply.
We start with waste that cannot be mechanically recycled, that's destined for incineration, landfill, or unfortunately, sometimes the environment. We unzip it with this technology back into its building blocks. We purify it, which is complicated when you're starting with garbage, you know, into pure monomers that are available to our current assets to make the same polymers we make today. It's a drop-in replacement. Brands don't have to change anything in how they do their products, and they can retain the exact same quality that they have now, which is not really that easy to do with mechanical recycling. It's infinite, and that's important. You know, this is an infinite loop. There's no degradation when you do this type of process.
In addition to that, it solves climate, so it's 20%-30% lower carbon footprint when you look at it just from the process efficiencies. We're not including green energy and how to make that number lower. That's additive. If you add in green energy, the carbon footprint drops dramatically from this 20%-30%. It's compelling on the waste problem, compelling on climate, and leverages the expertise that we have, and it's led to dramatic interest from our brands that are exceeding our expectations in fill out rates. Brad's gonna tell you about how we have to pull a Tritan polymer line forward and start constructing it now to keep up with demand. That $250 million for the methanolysis plant, you know, is gonna pick up a Tritan line because of accelerated growth.
Now it'll be about $425 million for the first plant with greater than 15% ROIC. It is a very attractive investment. On top of that, there's interest that goes beyond this first plant on this bottom chart. Brands want us to solve this problem beyond just the specialties that we make. They want us to provide circular PET packaging. They want us to provide recycled content and polyester textiles. We've got brands as well as countries highly engaged, and we've been working with them very successfully for the last year about building additional projects, and we're making very good progress on two additional projects, one in Europe and one additional plant here in North America.
We're really excited about this because it's a way to scale up and solve this problem and provide very attractive capital deployment and return on invested capital for our investors. To be clear, and Brad will spend more time on this, we only do it if it meets our terms and conditions in the contracting model for the circular packaging and textiles, which is we have to have long-term offtake agreements with stable spreads, you know, think cost-plus contracts, secure feedstock, and then we will leverage our advanced technology, our scalability, and our operations and construction ability to solve this problem for our brands. When you put it all together, these investments represent potentially $450 million of additional EBITDA on top of our specialty strategy. This is really exciting, and it's a serious capital deployment for us at very attractive ROICs.
That's not the end of it, right? The circular technology idea extends to our biopolymer stream, right? We've been in biopolymers for the existence of Eastman. You can go back 100 years to acetate film, and then we've developed all these specialty applications in AM and AFP and fibers that are very high value, and they've been historically only sold on functionality. Today, they're actually sold, you know, with that in mind, but on the sustainability drivers, right? We've had a polymer that is 60% bio content from sustainably grown forests, and it's been biodegradable for a long time. Now that's really interesting and important in many applications. With the second molecular recycling technology here, which we call the Carbon Renewal Technology, we can replace the fossil fuels with waste plastic, and we can use any waste plastic except PVC as feedstock.
It gives us very robust capability in managing the total waste stream. Add now the acetic anhydride being made from waste plastic instead of fossil fuels. It's a very compelling set of opportunities and new applications you'll hear about today, and this is another $200 million plus of EBITDA potential on top of the polyester, on top of the specialty growth. The third element is execution, and we continue to invest both in our growth execution and our ability to translate that to value in the bottom line and optimizing our cost structure. We're very proud of the fact that we're a very low-cost company, and we're constantly driving to be efficient, and we do that to fund growth as well as make sure we're translating value to our owners. The execution really falls into sort of two main columns.
The first one is on the innovation side. We continue to invest and add around our R&D, our application development capability, our process improvement capability, and Steve will talk to you about that. In addition, we continue to improve our operating capability, right? We have functional excellence to make sure we're delivering products on time to our customers and making those products. We have functional excellence in making sure we do everything very low cost, in a very disciplined matrixed organization. We are significantly improving our cost structure and operations. In addition to all this capability investment, there are digital tools that are being implemented to support and enhance this. We just completed a $30 million investment in our integrated business planning system to make us much more effective, both in cash management as well as earnings.
Our culture lays underneath all of this that is probably the most important element of Eastman's success. We have a team culture of everyone coming together to see the company succeed no matter what. That's been essential in fighting through all the chaos over the last three years. It's essential to keep growth programs going at the same time. It's essential to what we're gonna do in building this future. In addition to this, we're obviously focused on ESG like most companies. We have aggressive plans in place to manage our climate footprint, aggressive plans to improve the effectiveness of our organization every day through D&I, and having good, strong governance. On the carbon side, we have a very detailed plan.
Steve's gonna provide lots of detail on that around how we're gonna get our carbon footprint down between now and 2030, and the breakthrough technologies we're focusing on to get to a neutral position in 2050. It does fall into these categories as you expect, from energy efficiency to process improvements to renewable energy and breakthrough technologies. D&I is also incredibly important to us. It's essential to how we win. When you think about a challenged labor market and a global strategy that's about innovation and all that connection that we have to have in the marketplace, we need teams that are very engaged, very effective every day. If you're not getting the best out of your entire team, chances are not good. If you're not embracing the entire population to hire from, chances are not good.
We're very focused on improving our leadership with women in our organization, substantially increasing the participation in our organization from racially and diverse backgrounds, making sure our LGBTQ community feels that they are welcome and can be their authentic selves in how they create value for the company, and addressing any pay gaps we see across the demographics. It's nice to have all these strategies, but in the chemical industry, we have metrics for everything, and you gotta have metrics for this too. We have aggressive targets that we've laid out in our D&I report in April that our board manages with me, the teams are held accountable for, and we'll have an annual public transparent report every year, like our sustainability report about the progress that we're making.
All this, as I said, translates to very significant attractive cash, and we're proud of, you know, what we've been able to do on that front. As we look forward, the cash generation's gonna accelerate. Roughly $5 billion of operating cash flow in the next three years, combined with we're finally done with delevering. If we stay at a 2.5x EBITDA ratio, you know, that provides another $1 billion of cash. That $6 billion needs to be deployed in a disciplined manner. It will be disciplined like it always has been across organic M&A, returning cash to shareholders.
when you look at, you know, the history and how the future is gonna be a bit different, what you can see is about $1.4 billion of CapEx in the history, the last three years, $1 billion going to delevering, and the remainder going to shareholders and M&A, about $1.9 billion going to the shareholders. As we go forward, we're gonna have more cash, you know, $4.5 billion-$6 billion. The CapEx is gonna increase, right? Now, the specialty CapEx is staying the same. It's always in that $500 million-$600 million range, which includes $300 million of maintenance. But when you add on the circular economy investments, you've got that first plant, including the new Tritan line, you know, that adds up to roughly $2 billion, if you will, over the first three years.
Then you've got $4 billion available for deployment. Even if we do these two additional plants, which would be together roughly $1.5 billion in cash to build them, you still have $2.5 billion left over for share purchases and increasing dividend, returning cash to shareholders, or both on M&A. A very compelling cash story. We also wanted to take a moment to talk about sort of how we've stabilized our portfolio and how well we're performing. As you all know who know our history, we did a lot of portfolio change. We divested $3.5 billion of revenue in commodities, leading up to 2012. We did a series of acquisitions from 2012 - 2014 of great specialty businesses that was a huge structural upgrade to our portfolio.
Then we had all this innovative growth going that created a lot of value. From that, you know, there was great questions and excitement about that, but the big question we got from many of you in this room was, "Yeah, great, but in a stress test, how are you gonna hold up?" 'Cause that's the real test of the quality of a portfolio. Well, here's your answer. The EBITDA margins of Eastman are directly in line with the specialties. Those are who we view as our peers as we have been building our strategy and certainly as we move forward, you know, which is, you know, much more stable than some of the other, you know, commodity chemical companies in the industry. We have shown, not just promised, but shown we have a very stable portfolio. That's because of these four reasons, right?
We have innovation allowing us to grow faster in underlying markets. That mix improvement I talked about also improves your margins, not just the volume and asset utilization. We've been exceptionally good at managing spreads over time in our specialty business and doing an excellent job of that right now. Of course, there's always aggressive cost management, and Willie will tell you more about that also helps in stabilizing these spreads. We're very proud of how we've actually proven this portfolio is quite stable. When you think about this from a growth algorithm point of view, we had this algorithm up more or less in 2018, and even though we had a few derailments in the macroeconomy, this equation is still very much in place.
It's gonna be driving, you know, 8%-12% growth next year and compound from there. It starts with 2x the growth in these specialties, relative to underlying markets through the innovation. It's then followed by that growth combined with cost management leading to improving EBITDA margins as we move to 23%. Of course, there's a lot of cash, you know, roughly $1.6 billion a year. How this strategy can generate cash and how we deploy that in organic, in M&A, and in share repurchases. You've seen already a very large announcement last night and commitment of share purchases that we will explain in a little bit more detail later on. We're gonna start out aggressively on that front.
This translates to an improving ROIC, which ultimately is one of the key drivers to returns for shareholders in all these investments. These circular investments are particularly attractive on the ROIC front. When you think about this in review, we have a very robust strategy, and we have a long history to be proud of. A centennial celebrated last year, virtually unfortunately, was the start of how we got into this. Of 100 years of world-class technology and innovation and growth and improving our portfolio. Last 10 years, dramatically improving our portfolio. The last three years, fighting through a lot of challenges and demonstrating the strength of our team to manage that chaos, the innovation to offset challenges and deliver solid and strong performance.
As we look forward, all those momentums will continue into delivering significant value going forth with these five themes on the left. With that, I think it's a really exciting strategy. This is just the overview. We want Steve, Willie, Lucian, and Brad to bring this to life and how it really translates to value and the next level down. With that, I'm gonna hand it over to Steve.
Thank you, Mark, and good morning. I'm very excited to have the opportunity to come and talk to you about the progress that we've made with both our sustainability and our innovation strategy, and more importantly, have the opportunity to talk to you about the great outcomes that are being driven by the talented Eastman team on a global basis. Mark mentioned it, and you'll hear it through my conversation and Lucian and Brad as well, and that is the fact that the world's changed. There are significant sustainability related issues that just no longer can be ignored, and they're creating substantial innovation drivers for Eastman. What I hope to prove today is that our portfolio is inherently advantaged.
Our technologies, our products, and certainly our asset base as we think about circularity. We're excited about the future in front of us, and going forward, our sustainability strategy and our innovation strategy has now become one and the same. Our ESG framework governs everything that we do, from how we innovate to how we operate and to how we come together as a diverse and inclusive global Eastman team to provide practical solutions. Mark hit the innovation driven growth model. We've spoken about it extensively and consistently for several years. It's not changed.
The one thing that has occurred is our teams have gotten better and better at going out and relentlessly engaging the market, understanding what are those macro drivers, those innovation drivers, and also understanding where does that intersect with our world-class technology platforms. Where that occurs, we've now completed the build-out of what we call differentiated application development. That has really unlocked our innovation potential, and it's also improved dramatically our ability to execute. The model has not changed, but what has changed, as Mark covered, is the fact that the innovation drivers are much stronger. Let's break that down. That's happened because the global society has continued to grow. As it grew, energy consumption goes up. With that energy consumption going up, we now face a significant climate issue.
You're seeing it in every market, in every industry, the discussion around decarbonization, certainly true in automotive, certainly true in building and construction that relates directly back to us. On top of that, we have another issue, which is our overall economy is a linear economy. We go out and get our non-renewables, we bring them in, make products, use them, and then we discard them. That is not a sustainable solution. Circularity is a must, and it's gonna have to be closed.
We've got to do both, as Mark said, while we continue to actually care for society, because no one should have to compromise as we go through this process. If you look at our top 10 corporate growth platforms, this emergence or acceleration of the overall market drivers has actually focused us. There's three critical impact areas. Mark called it the Triple Challenge, which is how do you solve for climate? How do you provide circularity? And how do you do it while you still care for society? If you look across these platforms and look at those three areas, we are now 100% aligned. This is not a new concept for Eastman. We've always aligned our portfolio with innovation drivers.
If you look at the track record, you know, we are on track, and we are delivering new business from the innovation and from the launches that we talked about back in 2018. The one thing that I will say is that acceleration in the drivers is doing a couple things. One, it's actually expanding our addressable market, and it's also accelerating the launch pace of those new products that we have just put into the market themselves. That's happening in several different places. In the plastic arena, there is a big push around product safety, around green chemistry, and our copolyesters are just preferred.
Inside of our interlayers business, the innovations that we've had around acoustic, heads-up display and solar is actually helping the transition to EV and driving the climate improvements. Then the circular technologies that Mark just talked about, we now have recycled content in products, not just in Advanced Materials, but in Additives & Functional Products and also in Textiles. We're on track to deliver new business revenue that is going to approach $700 million by 2024. The portfolio very much on track. I talked about improving our execution and the fact that application development has unlocked that capability. So we'll define it for just a second.
Your application capability is really just your ability to understand how your product performs down the channel all the way at the consumer, where the value is ultimately created. In interlayers, our team can take our PVB resin, extrude it into a film just like we do in our commercial plants. We can then take that film, laminate it into a windshield at the same specification as our customer. We can also test, just like an OEM would, around acoustic properties, the solar blocking, and our optical physicists can also modify the film to get to the really sophisticated heads-up display. How does that help us? It helps us accelerate how we innovate with our customer because we can now run in parallel.
We can bring together prototypes that we can go to the OEM and actually create collaboration down the value chain. Probably most important, it also tells us what is the value that we're creating inside of the channel. Through our journey, as we looked at the macro trends and as we looked at our world-class technology platforms, we have chosen strategically six areas to build out deep application development competency. Through this journey, we have more than doubled the scientists and engineers that are now sitting inside of our application development labs, and we did it in a way where we now have thousands of years of experience inside the specific strategic industries that we're interested in. That has been a massive capability build for our organization.
We've also brought with it the equipment, many of you have seen it that's visited Eastman, to do the prototyping. We have multiple labs in U.S., in Europe, as well as in Asia Pacific. I'm gonna bring the model together by leveraging our cellulosic stream and how it's being reinvented. Mark talked about we've had this technology inside of our portfolio for more than 100 years. We've always sold just on functionality, but the sustainability profile of this technology has changed the game completely in terms of entitlement. The polymer has always been bio-based, 60% content from wood pulp that's sustainably sourced.
When we commercialized the Carbon Renewal Technology, the other part of the molecule is now made up of waste plastic, waste plastic that would have either been incinerated or went into landfill. 60% bio-based, 40% waste plastic, there is no better beginning of life story. From an end of life perspective, this same cellulosic biopolymer has always been biodegradable. Today, we have biodegradation certifications both in water and in soil, and our application competency has allowed us to build formulations where we can now make articles that actually compost, both in home composting as well as industrial composting. The data on the right is the data that I'm most excited about. It just came out the last couple of weeks ago.
It's an oceanographic or an ocean biodegradation study done by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which they are the world leaders. Basically they took several polymer families, and they made articles, either films or fabrics. Then they basically studied biodegradation over time. The data on the very bottom is actually our textiles Naia fabrics, and you'll see that the fabric actually biodegraded in less than 13 weeks. I mean, that is phenomenal and actually very similar to the same cotton fabric that was tested by Woods Hole in the exact same environment. Great outcome, but that's not what we're excited about.
The reason we're excited about it is, as you would expect from a great research institution like Woods Hole, they also fundamentally explained the mechanism for both the disintegration and the biodegradation through a natural enzymatic process in great detail. That translates into the fact that our Naia fibers will not persist as a microplastic. That is a game changer for this platform overall. How do we leverage that through our application competency? We've talked for the last couple three years about building that out inside of textiles. Inside the textiles industry, that is an industry that is very focused on sustainability. They care about beginning of life, they care about end of life, they want recycled content. We can now give them all three.
What's more important than that, and what my team often says is, "That's great, but the fabrics have to perform." As we build out our application competency, working with our market development team, working with our customer base, we now have a slate of fabrics that are very unique. They're very luxurious in terms of how they actually look. They have ease of care through some of the modifications that we've made, yet they have extreme comfort like a natural. That's opening up segments, especially if you think about the fashion area and the comfort area inside of womenswear. The platform is gaining momentum. We actually grew variable margin by more than 40% from 2018 through 2021, and that was through the COVID period. Now this platform's at scale.
The growth of Naia is now actually outpacing the decline that we have in tow, which was the strategic imperative of this program since the very beginning. If you say, "Okay, if you know the inherent capability of the technology and you know the macro trends, where else can this be leveraged?" A coworker of mine who leads actually our corporate innovation group is gonna give you her version of how we can take advantage of this platform to actually make the world a better place.
We've all heard the bad news. Climate change is real. Single-use plastic is filling landfills, being incinerated and leaking into the environment. We have microplastics being found everywhere, including our food system and in drinking water. Problem materials are being banned, and we see a massive push to move from fossils to bio-based feedstocks. There's a drive for recycled content in all products. Solutions are desperately needed to care for society, and consumers are demanding a better way. There's also plenty of good news. Solutions exist now that can help address each of these problems, and the market is demanding them. Eastman cellulosic materials offer solutions the world needs. Today, our cellulosics are 60% bio-based, 40% waste plastic. They're naturally biodegradable, they're compostable, and they will not persist in the environment.
Leveraging more than 100 years of expertise in cellulosic innovation, our solutions are now addressing big challenges in multiple applications, sustainable fibers for clothing, bio-based microbeads in body wash and face creams, and compostable packaging. Eastman Aventa radically outperforms other products in home and industrial composting. Reducing food and packaging waste, which are often thrown out together, can cut landfill methane, a major contributor to climate change. There is plenty of good sustainability news, and that is great news for all of us.
Okay. Great video by Shelley and the team. You can imagine, you know, that type of opportunity to drive change really excites the Eastman employees and rallies them around our innovation model. Let me bring this entire model to life. World-class technology platform, textiles industry with great significant macro drivers, especially in the sustainability space. We're able to leverage our application competency in textiles to pull those solutions through. Except we're not done. Everything that team learned along the journey around biodegradation, we then translated into our care additives application platform. Inside of that segment, especially in cosmetics, there's a significant microplastic issue with regulations soon coming. Lucian will tell you about the way we've been able to formulate products to actually solve that problem.
We also translated it into our engineering thermoplastics application platform as a model, right? We're now leveraging across the different application areas that we have, and that's what allowed very quickly our team to actually formulate a set of materials that will compost home and industrial. We've now launched in food service because they've got a significant issue around food waste. Food waste that goes into landfill. Landfill that's unmanaged creates methane, and everybody reads every day about methane and the overall relationship with greenhouse gas. When you look at a platform like that that biodegrades, it's extremely tunable. You think about controlled release, you can imagine where we're going with the platform overall.
We certainly expect, you know, high growth here, generating greater than $200 million of EBITDA by 2027 and accelerating and reinventing and resetting the life cycle of a world-class technology platform. Let me talk about we use the term world-class technology platform a lot, so let me kind of bring it to life in terms of what it is. At Eastman, with our technologies, we're looking for three things. We want our technologies to be able to solve problems in multiple markets so that we can leverage our model. And we just provided an example of that in cellulosics. But we also want our technologies to be tunable and control functionality so we can create differentiated value. That also allows us to build robust multi-generational technology plans.
That's important because it allows us to be predictable in terms of the value creation around our R&D investments overall. We really like it when we can start blending technologies across our streams. If you look at our cellulosics stream and you look at our copolyester stream, both have scale just in terms of overall volume, which gives us a great cost position. They're both also integrated with other streams inside of Eastman. For example, in our cellulosics stream, it's not just the cellulosics stream itself. We actually pull from acetyl, we pull from oxo, and we pull from olefin.
That gives us a very unique set of combination of chemistries where we can quickly customize products and fragment our product portfolio, and do it at a scale that provides a cost position that cannot be replicated. That is the way we leverage integration across the streams themselves. That creates superior value. As Mark mentioned, the variable margin where we can combine multiple technology platforms. We actually have variable margins that are 2x where we have technologies or products that come off single platforms. The good news is we do it in several places. We do it across all of our cellulose ester product lines, all of copolyesters. We also do it in our specialty ketones, which is sold through our coating segment.
We do it in our inner layers through our PVB stream, and we also do it in performance films. The list just goes on and on. When it comes to circularity, which I want to take a deeper dive in, it's actually our vertical integration that has provided the advantage. There's a lot of discussion around circularity in the press today and a lot of companies participate. The one thing that's unique about Eastman is we're a specialty materials company who basically compete on functionality and performance, except we're integrated all the way back to fossil feedstock.
Why that's critical is when we go out and get waste plastic and replace that fossil feedstock, the monomers that we make, from that waste plastic is actually the monomers that we need to actually grow our specialty businesses, which give us a unique asset, advantage overall. Let's talk about circularity and the problem that we're trying to solve. This is McKinsey data. On an annual basis, globally, there's 260 million metric tons of plastics that gets disposed of. Think of that number. That's a tremendous number. There's 16% of it that gets collected for recycle, and that's only recycled through mechanical recycling because that's the only recycling technology that's scaled today. Unfortunately, 40% gets landfilled, and on a global basis, 25% gets incinerated.
The number that's probably most concerning is there's 20% that's unmanaged. The problem absolutely has to be solved. You'll often hear people say, "Well, we just need to ban plastics." Except that is not the right answer. At Eastman, we believe in reduce any place where you can that doesn't harm quality of life and reuse. If you think about Tritan hydration bottles through Nalgene and CamelBak that actually go into a durable application replacing single-use plastic, that's a great example of reuse, right? You also have to recycle. That's you know a key point that I wanna make here, and that is Eastman fully believes that solving the waste plastic issue should not hurt climate.
The data on the left is data that our team pulled, that's third party, where we basically looked at energy intensity, right? In the given application we compared PET to aluminum to glass, and PET grossly outperformed. Aluminum being 2x the overall energy intensity, glass being 4x. We went and got this data without renewables. You may ask, "Why do you look at it without renewables?" We look at it without renewables because as we decarbonize and as the industry decarbonize, everyone's gonna be trying to leverage solar, wind, clean hydrogen. There is gonna be a limit on how much renewable energy is out there. We, as a society, is gonna have to allocate that renewable energy to the most energy efficient processes and get more sophisticated as we look across the entire ecosystem.
The data on the right just basically shows the power of recycled content. The recycled content in glass lowers its greenhouse gas footprint. Does that occur in aluminum. If you look at PET, and this is an Eastman estimate, if you could actually combine molecular recycling with mechanical recycling, you can get the recycling rates much higher. At this data point at just 50%, there is a tremendous impact on the overall greenhouse gas footprint of PET overall. We need to bring molecular recycling into the mix. Okay. Why is it that mechanical recycling actually needs a complementary technology? First and foremost, mechanical recycling is a great process. It should be used everywhere it can be used because it has a low carbon footprint, but it has limitations.
Mechanical recycling can only take the cleanest and clearest of waste plastic back. For PET, think bottle to bottle. Except when you go bottle to bottle, in a lot of cases, it doesn't actually go back to the bottle. In a lot of cases, it actually gets downcycled into strapping, park benches, other materials, and there's a fundamental reason for that. That is when you look at mechanical recycling and you bring a polymer back through it, the polymer actually degrades. As it degrades, you have a couple of issues. One is you can only if you basically close that entire bottle to bottle loop, there would be a certain amount of that polymer that would have to be purged, and you got to bring fresh material in.
The other limitation is there's material out there that's just hard to recycle waste plastic. Think of multilayer or materials that have colorants or additives. That has no outlet today. You need a complementary technology that comes in and partners with mechanical recycling to close the entire loop. That technology needs to be able to take the hard to recycle waste plastic, and it needs to be able to turn it into materials that have no compromise in quality. Okay? It also needs to do it at a lower greenhouse gas footprint than the heritage processes. That's the way we'll solve the waste plastic issue and the climate issue simultaneously. Okay.
Many people say, "Well, that's not possible." Except the reality is, it is very possible because if you look at molecular recycling processes, they have a head start. They start with waste plastic as a raw material. They don't go all the way back to fossil feedstocks. If you look at the two Eastman technologies, the CRT and PRT, Mark shared with you CRT's carbon footprint at the monomer level is 20%-50% lower, and with methanolysis, 20%-30% lower. Methanolysis is even more unique than that because methanolysis is the polyester family of polymers, and they quickly and simply unzip back to DMT and EG, which is basically the monomers that Eastman use today.
They don't fragment back into small molecules that you then have to go refine and clean up and bring back through the processes. The reason that's important, the fact that they go directly back to the monomer means that all those processes before it, which there's 10 unit ops, get eliminated. All the energy that you would have to use to clean up gets eliminated as well as the emissions. That's what makes the environmental footprint of methanolysis specifically unique to any other molecular recycling technology that's out there. Okay, so I just made molecular recycling seem easy, right? I'm now gonna tell you why Eastman is competitively advantaged. Any molecular recycling technology that gets commercialized, society ought to make sure that they're only taking the hard to recycle waste plastic.
We want the mechanical recyclers to do what they do, and we want to complement them. If that occurs, what it means is that your feedstock is gonna be very variable. It's gonna have multiple polymer families. It's gonna have different additives, which means the overall process of how you depolymerize the polyester and then purify it becomes the critical two steps. Okay. Eastman's advantage because we've actually done this for 30 years. As we partnered with Kodak, Kodak started out with a process where they went out and got X-ray film, brought it in, did methanolysis to depolymerize it to get back to the PET substrate. But they did it because there was precious metals on that X-ray film.
What they were focused on was, how can I, at really high efficiencies, get that precious metal off but also keep the quality of the DMT and EG such that I can build it back into the X-ray film, which is an optical application where clarity is critical. 30 years of focusing on how do I depolymerize so that I can efficiently purify and get to a polymer that has no compromise in quality overall. That is our heritage. There's also another reason, which is 70 years Eastman has been into what I'll call the integrated polyester manufacturing area. We don't just...
Back when we led the industry from a PET perspective, we didn't just make PET, we were paraxylene all the way through the intermediates, all the purification of 70 years of process chemistry and research to build out that competency. It has been one of our top competencies in the company all the way up, including today because of our copolyester line. Long history inside of intermediates and PET itself. Then there is the 100 years. As Mark mentioned, we celebrated our centennial last year. I would argue, and I may be a little bit biased, but Eastman's history is one of, we are one of the world's best at developing process chemistry and scaling it and industrializing it at the commercial level. We're not a start-up, right? We have that capability.
Our first plant's been built in Kingsport, Tennessee, about 500 yards from our corporate R&D organization. Mechanical complete in 2022. We'll start up in 2023. When we go into start-up, we will leverage the full scale of Eastman's process chemistry and process engineering to bring it to commercial success and carry forward that learnings into the other projects as well. Okay. I hit competitive advantage as it relates to the environmental impact of methanolysis to the advantages from a technology and operations side. Brad will give you great detail on what's going on on the commercial front. What I will say is the need here is phenomenally strong. I mean, the brands are just like us. They're very sustainability oriented. They are absolutely focused on really aspirational commitments around recycled content.
They need security of supply to make that come through. They need it to be a drop-in replacement so they don't have to change their entire value chain. They also need it to be a type of technology where there's no compromise in the overall performance of the end use polymers. As you can probably tell, we're very excited about what's in front of us and our innovation opportunity. You know, we know we can actually build a better world through how we innovate, but it's also important in terms of how we operate as a company as well. Mark talked to you about, you know, our focus on inclusion and diversity. Our sustainability strategy follows the same model as our innovation strategy.
That's in what we consider to be caring for society. It's very important that we create a culture in our company where our team members show up every day, be them full selves, and do their best work to drive the strategy forward. We also talked about circularity, and Brad will continue it. If you look at our sustainability report, you'll see that we had some aggressive goals of basically recycling 250 million pounds of waste plastic by 2025, 500 million pounds by 2030. As Brad talks about the additional projects, you can expect those numbers are gonna go substantially up. I mean, they may even double over a specific timeframe depending on the pace of the programs themselves. Okay. I do wanna hit climate.
We also said that we're committed to carbon neutrality by 2050. Eastman's not just starting today. We have had energy reduction programs in place for the past decade. If you go back to 2008 and look at our performance through 2020, while we've grown the company, we've actually already reduced our absolute Scope 1, Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 20%. Very few companies can say that across that timeframe. We have momentum. We not only set the 2050 carbon neutrality goal, but we also were very aggressive in the short term. Carbon neutrality from 2020 to 2050, but we wanna be a third of the way there by the time that we get to 2030.
Our climate group, our climate operating group inside the company has a very detailed plan that they're working today, and they're pulling multiple levers. The first thing that we're doing is we're working very hard to convert all of our steam boilers to less carbon intensive fuel sources. If you look from 2015 to 2020, we actually reduced our dependency on coal by more than 50%. Now, if you look across the entire corporation at our energy mix, it's less than 20%, and we're fully committed to getting or completing all of those transitions. We've also leveraged digital quite extensively. We have integrated heat and power at our two largest sites where we make our own steam and electricity.
They're already 40% more efficient than if you bought steam and electricity over the fence. We're now using digital tools and digital modeling to further optimize those individual systems. That's dramatically impacting our greenhouse gas footprint, but also our cost structure. We're not only doing it at that level, but we're doing it at the unit op level. Even you know areas like inside of distillation, we now have the ability from a digital perspective for our operations team to see their carbon impact, if you will, moment by moment as they operate. That's not only driving efficiency, it's also driving the culture of decarbonization across the entire company.
You can expect in 2022, we'll come out with some really aggressive goals around renewables and how we plan to leverage that across the Eastman fleet of sites. You know, for sure, we're gonna continue to be investing in the molecular recycling technologies, and that helps us both ways. Both Scope 1 and 2, also Scope 3 because we're actually replacing fossil feedstock directly. When it comes to Scope 3, our team is working really hard right now to quantify the entire scope of, you know, what we would consider to be our Scope 3 accountability. We're not waiting on that qualification. We're actually working now with our suppliers and customers to decarbonize our entire value chain.
We're very committed to working with the industry to set up industry-wide framework that will provide transparency and hopefully a simple method for both measuring and quantifying our Scope 3 as we set targets and drive them down. Everything we just talked about in the first 10 years, we feel very good about. We have a roadmap. It's very detailed. It's board-governed. Our environmental sustainability and safety committee at our board basically reviews progress. Actually in 2021, they reviewed twice within the year. That level of accountability is being driven down through our teams, but also at our management team as well. 2050 is not that far away.
Carbon neutrality for our industry is gonna mean we're gonna have to bring on emerging technologies. We have working teams now that's out looking at technology readiness, also looking at how those emerging technologies would actually integrate into the Eastman system. We guarantee that carbon recovery is gonna be a key part of our journey, as well as electrification, but only electrification where it makes sense and it can actually be efficient, as we talked about earlier. Hydrogen, because of the nature of our assets, will certainly be a part of our solution set. Work to do here. No company is gonna solve these issues completely on our own. We're partnering aggressively with our trade groups, with our university network, and with our overall national labs.
We're both excited and very proud of what the Eastman team has accomplished, and we're excited about the future. As Mark called out, we're being noticed. With that, I'll turn it over to Brad to talk about AM.
Hey, good morning. Very excited to be with you this morning. I hope you're excited about what you've heard from Mark and Steve. I mean, tremendous momentum on our innovation programs. Great progress on building capabilities across the company. As you just saw, truly a transformation of our position in the industry. You know, I joined this company 20 years ago, and I would never imagine we could put up a slide like what Steve just put up. I certainly wouldn't have dreamed that we'd be on the list of the top 50 companies changing the world and the only materials company. As Steve just said, we're all incredibly proud of what we've accomplished, but we're even more excited about the future.
What I'm gonna tell you over the next 35 minutes is how we're gonna translate that momentum into industry-leading earnings growth in AM. What I wanna do is start by giving you a bit of an understanding of our foundation for success. Really two simple things: the strength of our portfolio and the power of our innovation-driven growth model. I'll spend some time then talking about how we're evolving both, but mainly I wanna spend the bulk of our time bringing to life some examples. You've heard a lot about the technologies. I'm gonna show you how that comes to fruition in the market.
Finally, I'll wrap up with giving you a line of sight to how that turns into industry-leading earnings growth in this segment, and then very excited to spend some time on what Mark talked about, the opportunity beyond 2024 to really scale up our circular platform and deliver $450 million plus in EBITDA. A lot to talk about. Let me start by giving you a bit of a profile of the business. Very appropriate, given what I just said on earnings, to start with the bar chart you see up here on the screen. Truly exceptional performance from 2012 to 2018. If I think about 16% compounded annual growth in that long a time period, that's really unparalleled in our space. I would argue that next set of bars is equally impressive.
8%-10% growth during the time period that we've been in. Trade war, unprecedented supply chain issues, global pandemic, and then, put on top of that, what you see in the upper left-hand side of that slide, a third of our revenue is coming from transportation. We truly have had to create our own growth in this segment during that time period. You ask, how did we do that? Well, when you think about the diverse market footprint, what it gives us the opportunity to do is go out and identify the applications that are poised for disruption, poised for exceptional growth, and so that we leverage that portfolio of specialty films and specialty plastics to deliver strong, compelling material solutions to those unmet needs.
Now, one of the important things to note about this set of businesses that's common across all of them is we truly are delivering a material solution. In the performance films business, we put our product in the box and ship it directly to a dealer. It then goes to the consumer. Even in the films business and the plastics business, although we're selling through a converter, it's a fairly simple conversion step. It could be a glass laminator taking our film, laminating glass around it, or in plastics an injection molder. Why is that important? Well, it gives us a high degree of control over the functionality that we deliver. Equally important, it's how you get paid for innovation. Feel very good about this as a starting point. You've already heard we feel exceptionally good about our innovation-driven growth model.
You've heard both Mark and Steve define it, so I'm not gonna try and define it again for you, but what I wanna do is call out a few unique things, and I am. The first is this model always starts and gets its foundation from having world-class positions, and we truly have that across our technologies. True global leadership in polyesters, PVB films, in our cellulosics, biopolymers, and across the board on our premium auto window films and paint protection. Now, as we've already established this morning, that's insufficient to create superior value. You move over to that right-hand side, as you heard from Mark, and that's where everything starts in terms of how we connect those platforms to the end markets.
One thing that's very different about our business than most material businesses is we deploy over 50% of our external-facing resources all the way at the end of the chain, so either at leading brands or OEMs. Now, what that gives us is really what you see down on the bottom. The ability to find that intersection between applications and customers that can fuel growth greater than 2x the underlying market. As you heard from Steve, and I think Mark called it the secret sauce, what's in the middle? That allows us to take those platforms, fine-tune them, tweak them to deliver on those unmet needs. Equally important, demonstrate the benefits in use and be able to defend the value that ultimately ends up in a 3x premium, relative to our standard products. Truly a strong foundation for success between those two.
Throughout the rest of my conversation, you're not gonna hear us make any shifts in that strategy. Instead, what you're gonna hear us do is continue to evolve that. That is, in fact, what we've done since 2018. I won't go back over the earnings growth. I've already made that pitch. What I do wanna talk about is that next bullet. I said, creating our own growth. Here's the evidence of what that looks like. Those are our top three markets. I think all of you are well aware what transportation looks like during that time period. Down 15%-20%, you could pick your number. We're up 10%. Note this is volume and mix, so there's no price impact in there. That truly is creating your own growth.
The same is true in durable and electronics, and even though B&C may not look as impressive, I'll take 200 basis points over the market anytime when it comes to growth. You compound that out, it makes a big difference. I said evolving that model is important. One of the key things is how do we build new platforms? You've already heard what we're doing in the way of circularity. Truly a leadership position that we're building in the circular platform. Also, I think both speakers touched on digital services. We do a lot of things to wrap services around our products. Increasingly, we're doing that both via organic efforts, but increasingly also using bolt-ons.
Very happy with what we've been able to do in the performance films arena with the recent acquisition, and I'll show you to bring that to life in a few slides. Then finally, in the past, when I've had discussions with a lot of you, people say, "Well, is your premium products really a big part of your portfolio?" Very pleased to share today that that has now become 40% of our revenue in this segment. Equally, pleased to share that despite all the chaos in the external world, we've been able to successfully execute capacity additions to make sure that we can sustain that double-digit growth in this portfolio over the next several years. In a great position. The reason I'm very pleased to say that is this is the kind of growth we've been delivering.
Just wanted to bring it to life with three premium products. If you take a look at paint protection film, almost doubled the business in a three-year time period. Tritan, all of you know we're growing from a very big base. We've grown by more than 50% in this three-year time period. Then in the middle, our head-up display, 20%+ growth at a time period when the markets are down. Very strong portfolio, very powerful innovation-driven growth model, lots of momentum. I wanna now shift to talk about how we're gonna sustain and accelerate that momentum going forward. I'm gonna do that by sharing some examples. I wanna start, and you'll see every one of these examples start with a category that's poised for disruption or some significant compelling unmet needs that we think we can fuel growth off of.
Paint protection is certainly one of those categories. When you look at what the drivers are for paint protection and the growth we're seeing, really starts with the three key trends. First, people are owning their cars longer. Second, they're increasingly spending more on the vehicle. Third, they're very interested in driving down maintenance costs, and so in this instance, how do I avoid refinish? What that then turns into is increasing adoption. First, we've gone from just being used on premium vehicles to increasingly being used across a broad make of models. In fact, last year, our most filmed vehicle was the Toyota. That was quickly followed by Tesla. Very much a mainstream of this product line. The other thing that's happened is, as that mainstreaming occurred initially, it was primarily on the front bumper or the side mirrors.
Today, you now see us across the hood, front quarter panels, really anywhere you can think of durability issues. Finally, it's a category that's gone from being very North American to truly a global category, and you can see that in these percentage of growth. Obviously, still good growth in North America, but exceptional growth in Europe and Asia as adoption occurs there. A strong position from a category standpoint, but the real question always is. How are we positioned to capitalize on that? Here's where I wanna show you the innovation-driven growth model kind of in action in the marketplace. Here we truly check all three boxes. Steve talked about having technologies that cut across the company. This is a great example. Our Gen 3 coating is up there on the left-hand side. You see an OEM paint on the right-hand side.
You can see muddy water's been splashed on there, which you see with our coating is hydrophobicity. You see that water beading up. What does that mean from a car owner? It means you don't have to wash your car as often. Now, how we delivered that technology innovation is our Tetrashield coating from our coatings business, and it's underpinned by the TMCD monomer that actually is in Tritan. Just a great example of the integration that Steve had touched on a few minutes ago. In the middle, you see our digital services were wrapped around it. In the video, you saw Julie talk a little bit about that. You know, here, what we basically have is a software program that houses all the patterns that you have out there on vehicles.
When a car comes into a dealer, they can scan them in . That then sends a pattern to their digital printer, prints out the pattern. The installer can take it, put it on with very limited cutting. That's always been a winning value proposition for our customer base, but you can imagine in today's constrained labor market, an even stronger value proposition. Finally, we've got a team of professionals out in the marketplace that truly are obsessed on winning with the customer and helping them win in the market. Now, that's always an ingredient for success, but here we're selling to family businesses, small to medium-sized businesses. If you can help put more money in their pocket, you drive loyalty up in a very big way, and that's what you see in this particular instance.
We have a 3x preference using Net Promoter Score to the next best brand in the marketplace. Truly a strong position and gives me the confidence of what you see on the top, that we're positioned to grow more than 3x the underlying market. Again, automotives have pretty good growth rates going forward. I want to pivot now, and I'll switch over to interlayers. Here's another category ripe for transformation. I don't think I have to make a pitch about what you see happening in electric vehicles. You know, certainly a lot of growth, but that's not what our growth equation really emanates from. What we have here is the opportunity for a lot more laminated glass to be used in this market. 3.5x more glass on an average EV than a standard vehicle.
Now, that may not be obvious as to why that would be the case. If you think about it, when you're in an electric vehicle, the way it's designed, both the driver and the passenger are sitting up very high. The design engineers wanna create a feeling of space that starts with having a very large sunroof, actually 50% larger than what you'd see on a windscreen, also larger front windscreens, and then finally, more laminated glass used on the side windows. 3.5 times the square footage of laminated glass. Equally important, the opportunity to impart a lot more functionality into that. You can imagine most of the buyers of these vehicles are very technology-savvy individuals, so more head-up display. Second, a lot more glazing here.
You can imagine solar control becomes very important in any vehicle in that situation. Given that these are EVs, obviously wanna reduce the air conditioner load, so solar management becomes even more important. Then finally, I touched on the importance of acoustics. Again, with no engine noise, very important to control the cabin environment. Instead of me telling you about how we win in this marketplace, I wanna use a little video as well, introduce you to Travis Smith, who's here in the room, our division President. He'll share a little bit of his passion for EV and more importantly, kinda how our teams are winning the marketplace. The future of the automotive industry is electric, and Eastman is well ahead of the curve.
We're solving problems others have yet to define, like understanding the science behind what is quiet and how to overcome a cabin environment filled with wind, road, and traffic noise. It's understanding that humans hear by context, how our brains fill in missing sounds. That won't work with voice-activated commands, especially in a car filled with outside noise. Eastman Saflex enhanced acoustic interlayers enable that quiet interior, so a car's voice recognition can make out every syllable and every word.
We're developing solar interlayers that create the premium cabin environment and enable the driving range consumers expect. We enable the advanced autonomous driving features of tomorrow with interlayers designed specifically for new advanced heads-up displays, creating an immersive and safer driving experience. We're doing these things and more to create multifunctional interlayers that allow our industry partners to solve the unique needs of electric vehicles. It is our growth model in action, world-class technology platforms, deep application knowledge, and relentless market engagement. We are making advances and will continue to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. The future of the industry is electric, and Eastman is positioned to win.
Certainly you see all that innovation driving a lot of new complex problems. What you also see is the investments we've made in application development are giving us a differentiated capability to solve those problems. That's getting recognized by the brands downstream, the OEMs. You can see that in this quote, but perhaps more evidence of that is the win rate you see below it. Last year, at a time when we were already winning a lot in this business, by the evidence I showed you on the outgrowing the market, 25% of our wins were actually in the EV segment. Here, you know, again, very well positioned to outgrow the market. We would estimate about 2x the underlying market in interlayers. I wanna pivot again from the films area and talk about a whole industry that is poised for disruption.
You've already heard about this from both Mark and Steve. When you think about the plastics industry, it truly will have to transform over the next 10 years, and it has to happen now. You know, plastic waste crisis, the climate crisis we're facing around the globe, it's causing consumers to demand very different things from the brands, and the brands are stepping up with very bold commitments on recycled content. What you see on this page is data from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, EMF, I'll refer to it as throughout the presentation, leading NGO. These are just the commitments these brands have made to have a minimum of 25% recycled content, as much as 50% recycled content by 2025. Those commitments, in fact, increase over time and in some instances go up to 100% by 2030.
What does that mean? Well, a true step change in the polyester space. When you think about what's gonna have to happen to deliver on that, you need 950 KMT of additional supply in Europe just to serve that. 50% more in North America than that. Incredibly large amount of supply needs to come online by 2030 to have a chance to deliver on those expectations. Now, Steve already touched on the only commercially available technology to do that today is mechanical recycle content. What you already see happening in Europe, where the move has already shifted over time or has been a little bit more at work in terms of the adoption, you see a supply-demand imbalance occurring, and you see these premiums developing.
If you look at the data on the left-hand side of that chart, you see that recycled content from mechanical is commanding a 40%-50% premium. We're far from the 25% commitment levels I just talked about. I'd say the industry is about 4%-5%. What's gonna have to happen to solve that? Well, it's what Steve talked about, innovation in molecular recycling. I'm very pleased with where we sit today to play a leadership role in making that happen. That starts with the announcement we've previously made around building the world's largest polyester recycling facility. Again, if you're not familiar with it, I'll just hit a few key facts. You know, most important, we start with 110,000 tons of hard-to-recycle plastic.
We're not going after mechanical grade or the bottle grade. We're going after the stuff that doesn't traditionally have any value. We're then using our very innovative technology to unzip that waste into its basic intermediates, then using our polymer plants to rebuild that up into food grade, medical grade polymers, and that turns into 150-200,000 tons of polymer. Now, what we can do with that in the marketplace is really three things. Much further penetrate our markets. Two, value up our overall business. Three, we're seeing some exciting opportunities to get into completely new markets. Now I wanna hit a few other things.
You already heard some of this from Mark and Steve, but just want to highlight that the great growth that I showed earlier on Tritan, that 50% growth, has allowed us to pull forward our investment on the next Tritan line. Today we're announcing the addition of 80,000 tons of Tritan capacity. That'll be online by 2023. The second thing is I wanna reiterate our commitment to having this plant mechanically complete by the end of the next year, and then it will be operational in 2023. Finally, as was touched on earlier, very large investment but very attractive returns. Feel very good about our position to lead the industry and show what is possible. I do wanna take a minute to highlight where we're at on feedstock.
Again, as we've touched on, there's a lot of waste out there. When it comes to the polyester side, 9 billion kgs. We're not really in need of a lot of this. It hasn't historically been developed because there wasn't value for it. Our strategy is really to use the technology that Steve talked about. Two key things to remember, our unique ability to depolymerize and our unique ability to purify. Now, what that allows us to do is then go out and do what we have on the bottom there, create completely new streams. We're then able to turn those into partnerships. A great example of that is what we've done with circular polymers, where we went out and helped them show the value of what you could get out of carpet.
We turned that into a partnership where that carpet's now coming in the front of the plant and turning into, again, medical grade, food grade product. Today, we went through the qualification process with some 125 suppliers. Very pleased to share that we've got over 50% of our annual requirement covered. We'll push that number up some as we get closer to startup, but you won't ever expect us to get close to 100%, because this is all about managing that mix to make sure we have the most advantaged feedstock, and we've got the technology to do that. Wanna leave you with, we're in a good position on the feedstock side. Customers, you know, equally strong position here.
You know, if you would have told me we would have the breadth and depth of brands that are listed on this slide 12 months before we actually start up, I would have never thought that'd be possible. It's very hard in our industry to get brands to allow you to attach our name or a supplier's name to them. To do this 12 months before startup is a terrific indicator of the strength of our value proposition. Let me show you some examples of why brands are willing to do that. I think cosmetics is perhaps one of the best places to start, as it really gives you an idea of the breadth of the products that we can bring to the market. What you see across here is a variety of polyester polymers.
What's important to know about those is we can tune them from anywhere from 25% - 50%- 100% recycled content. As Steve touched on before, they're drop-ins, so really no specification work, no processing work done, needed on their part. Finally, no compromise in performance. That's exceptionally important. I put this up here because you can imagine that level of clarity, that level of mechanical property, very hard to do with mechanical recycling. Arguably not possible to be done. When you add all those together, feel very confident in our ability to grow 4x the underlying market in cosmetics. Again, cosmetics is a good starting point in terms of growth, always GDP plus. An example on how we go after existing markets.
We got a lot of other existing markets examples I could share, but I wanted to take an opportunity to talk about new markets and how this is creating access to markets we hadn't seen and partnerships we would have never thought of. Again, for this, I want to take an opportunity to introduce you via video to Scott Ballard, our Division President for this area. He's in the room, and I'll turn it over here.
Today, brands are recognizing that consumers want sustainable products in all industries, and they're willing to change the materials they use to remain competitive in the marketplace. They're not willing to compromise on the materials performance. Things like durability, color, or safety, and they shouldn't have to. Plastics recycled with traditional methods are often downcycled, and they struggle to meet the stringent requirements of high-performance applications. By using molecular recycling, Eastman transforms plastic waste into durable, advantaged, high-quality products with an infinite life. This means our specialty materials are uniquely positioned to provide sustainability without compromising quality for brands like BLACK+DECKER. BLACK+DECKER chose Tritan Renew with certified recycled material for their new Reviva line to satisfy their and their customers' desires for sustainability. This is the first power tool with a powerful sustainability story. The latest example of how we're collaborating with market leaders.
Our team is leveraging technology and application development expertise to deliver sustainable solutions to an application that demands a high-performance material.
Partnering with Eastman to apply their Tritan Renew material to our BLACK+DECKER reviva products has created the opportunity to reduce environmental impact while continuing to develop the performance, durability, and quality that our customers require. We're delighted to have found a long-term partner in Eastman, a company that will support and accelerate our wider, broader commitment to becoming a force for good in society.
Brands who wanna meet consumer demand for sustainable materials can look to Eastman to make it happen. They don't have to wait. We're showing the world what's possible right now, and we're just getting started.
In that video, you could see that somebody like BLACK+DECKER is looking for both a corporate partner that has a strong track record on sustainability, but also an offering that actually meets their requirements. We're finding more and more of those opportunities in new markets. Very exciting. I wanna show you how we take an alpha customer relationship like that and show you how we transform a whole category. On the next slide here, I wanted to talk about phone cases. This is an example or a growth story that started with Verizon deciding to make a different move in their phone case category. They decided to go with selling 50% of their phone cases with recycled content.
We then forged a partnership with Lander, very similar to what we just did with BLACK+DECKER, developed and launched a new product using Tritan Renew 50% recycled content. What you can see happen after that is with the success in the market, the share they gained, broad adoption across the rest of the players in the category in 2021, and now even new innovation programs scaling up in 2022. Truly a flywheel. I share this because it's a good testament to the market and application development expertise and capabilities we've built over many, many years. This is actually what's allowed us to build Tritan into a $500 million-plus business. Great testament to our execution capabilities, gives me great confidence in our ability to seize these opportunities that are coming our way in new markets.
Giving you a lot of examples, I now wanna elevate back and say, well, what does that mean at the Advanced Materials segment level? What it means is we're gonna leverage this proven formula for success that we showed you in 2018 that's continued to build momentum to deliver industry-leading earnings growth. Again, we start with markets that have good underlying growth. As I stand in front of you today and think about the period going forward, we have the benefit of the auto recovery. We could all have a debate about when that's gonna happen, but it'll certainly happen over the next three years. In the middle is the real power of the model, the mix upgrade that I've just shown you lots of examples. Again, when you net that whole portfolio of premium products, they're growing about 2x the underlying markets.
When you net that portfolio of premium products together and think about their selling price relative to our average selling price, 3x our standard selling price. Truly an opportunity to drive a lot of leverage on the P&L. Then finally, on the right-hand side, we've benefited over the years by fixed cost leverage and quite significant fixed cost leverage 'cause we're growing from a small base. Going forward, we won't have such a fixed cost leverage benefit, but very pleased to say we don't have a headwind. Bringing on this kind of high-value business and being able to say you have a modest improvement in fixed cost is a tremendous equation. You net all that together, and you take 4%-5% market growth and turn it into double-digit earnings growth.
Twelve months ago, I would have said this is where we stop the conversation, and I would have been equally confident in saying that we can deliver industry-leading earnings growth. As you heard from Mark and Steve today, we're incredibly excited to be able to build on this. We wanna build on this by going beyond durables. You ask, "Well, why do we, you know, what's driving us to move forward as fast as we are on these circular platforms?" Well, it starts with what you see on the right-hand side of this slide. Tremendous market pull. Companies like Procter & Gamble coming to us and saying, "You have a unique offering. You have a unique capability." You can see how they're leveraging it in their leading brands, in this instance, Herbal Essences, in a relaunch around sustainability.
I won't go back over all the reasons they're coming to us because I think Steve did that in quite a very good manner and an in-depth manner, but I wanna hit the kinda high points. Number one, 100 years in the business. That's important to them. They're worried about getting caught greenwashing or having other negative issues come up, so our 100-year track record is incredibly important to them. 70 years in polyesters, certainly important. The fact that we've operated these kind of plants for 30 years, that's unparalleled. Finally, in the middle, we've touched on it, but the idea that we can deliver performance without compromise, these category managers don't really wanna spend their time on packaging. So as they go through this change, they're not excited about sometimes paying for the value. They also don't wanna have to go through a whole re-qualification process.
You know, the fact that we're a drop-in replacement, no concern about the mechanical integrity, the clarity, that's needed in these, a winning equation. Now we're keenly aware that packaging is a highly competitive market. We certainly lived through the commoditization of PET. I would suggest that based on all the dynamics that we're talking about today, packaging won't be viewed like that over the next decade. We're not gonna bet on that dynamic holding true because we don't need to. We've got such a unique offering that we're gonna take a very different approach to contracting. What we're gonna do is really three key things. First, when it comes to customer contracts, long-term contracts, but more importantly, take or pay contracts and cost plus. Second, you know, certainly long-term feedstock supply here.
As we build out these plants, you'll see us talk about the feedstock positions, finally getting advantaged energy positions on these. What that gives us is certainly stability of earnings and incredibly impressive returns, and I'll talk about that in a couple slides. For the customers, it gives them much better transparency into what their pricing is gonna be because we've got a cost-plus model very different than what they're experiencing in that mechanical PET arena that I showed, just again to put these projects then in context for you in terms of investment and what it'll look like. Very similar to what I showed around our Kingsport facility, but what's different here is we are going to not only need to invest in the methanolysis portion of the plant but also in the polymer lines.
These will also be either brownfield or greenfield sites. When you think about the investment here and so that 450 I showed before, 425, we're talking about $600 million-$800 million when you think about it. Greater than 12% ROIC, so very attractive returns. I would also note that when you think about the accretion from these plants. Very easy to see it under 12 months, but realistically under 24 months, realistically under 12 months. The reason is because of that contracting strategy, we're in a position to fill out that plant much faster than you would when you're growing a specialty business. How do we turn that into reality? We've touched on this as well. We've got two very active projects, one in the U.S., one in Europe.
These aren't just concepts. We're actually negotiating LOIs. We're negotiating with customers. We're negotiating the supply side. In many instances, we're looking at the site locations. At this point in time, obviously, there's always a lot that can change on a project this size, but we feel very good about the potential to at least announce one of these in the first half of next year, if not both of them. If we are successful to the point where we announce both of them, we will stagger them a little bit. It's important to note the market demand is there and the customer demand is there for 2025, so we'll be driving to get them both up and running by 2026 at the very latest.
Exciting opportunity to add $450 million in EBITDA by 2026 on top of what I just already talked about in terms of our proven model in the specialty side of this business. Bringing that back in terms of helping you understand the sources of growth, when you think about now till 2024, shouldn't be a surprise what you see in that first bar. Very good volume and mix growth that stems from all of the innovation that I just showed you, those market development and innovation programs empower. Very consistent with what we've demonstrated really over the last 10 years, just from a larger base.
The next bar, spread normalization, might be more of a question for some of you, but those of you that have followed us know that our pricing strategy in this segment has always been to deliver very stable pricing. When raw materials go down, we lag. When raw materials go up, we lag. We've been chasing the raw materials up through the course of this year, with our pricing actions at the end of third quarter, the pricing actions through the fourth quarter, and the annual contract negotiations that we have in this business. We'll kick off January with spreads normalizing. We have a $100 million tailwind as you go through next year just on spreads returning to their normal levels. That's not betting on future pricing actions. That's actually what we already have in place.
Again, just put that in perspective, you can think about what that means to short a 20% earnings growth from that alone. When you think about cost management, we will have some tailwinds just from our overall optimization efforts across the enterprise. Obviously, to support the growth that I've just outlined, we will be investing heavily in making sure we're in position not just for 2024, but as I highlighted, 2025 and 2026. Very exciting story. I would be remiss if I didn't do two things. First, I want to thank the women and men across Eastman that built this business and continue to set it up for success, that have us in a position to deliver these kind of superior outcomes for all of our stakeholders.
I'm always appreciative of their efforts, but you can imagine these last two years have been exceptionally tough. To battle through all the day-to-day and get us in this position, just couldn't be more appreciative of their efforts. Second, thank you for your engagement, letting me share their great story. We're now to a break. I'm sure you're ready for that break. We'll give you 20 minutes, and then I'm gonna turn it over to Lucian Boldea. He'll come back and talk about the transformation of AFP and CI, some very exciting stuff going on. Please come back and join us on time. Thanks.
Eastman has been enhancing the quality of life in a material way for more than 100 years. With 14,000 global employees, our four reporting segments include Advanced Materials, Additives & Functional Products, Chemical Intermediates, and Fibers. Our innovative solutions are showing the world what's possible, whether that means making your food safer, everyday products more sustainable, or interlayers that lighten electric vehicles and improve their range.
We're working hard to mitigate climate change and are committed to being carbon neutral by 2050. We have innovative products that will grow as the world decarbonizes. The Wall Street Journal and Barron's both named us one of the world's most sustainably managed companies, and we were listed in the top 25 of the 2021 Fortune Change the World list. Eastman is a leader in the circular economy. We're on track to complete the world's largest polyester molecular recycling facility by the end of 2022.
When you think about our employees, generations have been part of the Eastman family. We have accelerated our commitment to inclusion and diversity and constantly earn honors as a top employer. We were named one of the world's most ethical companies for the seventh time. Our employees and our company have proven to be resilient during difficult and tough times.
We've also transformed from within by strengthening our execution capabilities and improving our cost structure, and we're making digital products to meet customer needs for the twenty-first century. Core is a digital platform that helps our customers improve the accuracy and efficiency of film cutting for paint protection film. We've come a long way since George Eastman founded our company as part of Kodak in 1920, and we're looking forward to showing you how much farther we plan to go.
We've all heard the bad news: climate change is real. Single-use plastic is filling landfills, being incinerated, and leaking into the environment. We have microplastics being found everywhere, including our food system and in drinking water. Problem materials are being banned, and we see a massive push to move from fossil to bio-based feedstocks. There's a drive for recycled content in all products. Solutions are desperately needed to care for society, and consumers are demanding a better way. There's also plenty of good news. Solutions exist now that can help address each of these problems, and the market is demanding them. Eastman cellulosic materials offer solutions the world needs. Today, our cellulosics are 60% bio-based, 40% waste plastic. They're naturally biodegradable, they're compostable, and they will not persist in the environment.
Leveraging more than 100 years of expertise in cellulosic innovation, our solutions are now addressing big challenges in multiple applications. Sustainable fibers for clothing, bio-based microbeads in body wash and face creams, and compostable packaging. Eastman Aventa radically outperforms other products in home and industrial composting. Reducing food and packaging waste, which are often thrown out together, can cut landfill methane, a major contributor to climate change. There is plenty of good sustainability news, and that is great news for all of us.
The future of the automotive industry is electric, and Eastman is well ahead of the curve. We're solving problems others have yet to define, like understanding the science behind what is quiet and how to overcome a cabin environment filled with wind, road, and traffic noise. It's understanding that humans hear by context. Our brains fill in missing sounds, but that won't work with voice-activated commands, especially in a car filled with outside noise. Eastman Saflex enhanced acoustic interlayers enable that quiet interior, so a car's voice recognition can make out every syllable in every word. We're developing solar interlayers that create the premium cabin environment and enable the driving range consumers expect. We enable the advanced autonomous driving features of tomorrow with interlayers designed specifically for new advanced heads-up displays, creating an immersive and safer driving experience.
We're doing these things and more to create multifunctional interlayers that allow our industry partners to solve the unique needs of electric vehicles. It is our growth model in action. World-class technology platforms, deep application knowledge, and relentless market engagement. We are making advances and will continue to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. The future of the industry is electric and Eastman is positioned to win.
Today, brands are recognizing that consumers want sustainable products in all industries, and they're willing to change the materials they use to remain competitive in the marketplace. They're not willing to compromise on the material's performance, things like durability, color, or safety, and they shouldn't have to. Plastics recycled with traditional methods are often downcycled, and they struggle to meet the stringent requirements of high-performance applications. By using molecular recycling, Eastman transforms plastic waste into durable, advantaged, high-quality products with an infinite life. This means our specialty materials are uniquely positioned to provide sustainability without compromising quality for brands like BLACK+DECKER. BLACK+DECKER chose Tritan Renew with certified recycled material for their new Reviva line to satisfy their and their customers' desires for sustainability. This is the first power tool with a powerful sustainability story, the latest example of how we're collaborating with market leaders.
Our team is leveraging technology and application development expertise to deliver sustainable solutions to an application that demands a high-performance material.
Partnering with Eastman to apply their Tritan Renew material to our BLACK+DECKER Reviva products has created the opportunity to reduce environmental impact while continuing to develop the performance, durability, and quality that our customers require. We're delighted to have found a long-term partner in Eastman, a company that will support and accelerate our wider, broader commitment to becoming a force for good in society.
Brands who wanna meet consumer demand for sustainable materials can look to Eastman to make it happen. They don't have to wait. We're showing the world what's possible right now, and we're just getting started.
Eastman has been enhancing the quality of life in a material way for more than 100 years. With 14,000 global employees, our four reporting segments include Advanced Materials, Additives & Functional Products, Chemical Intermediates, and Fibers. Our innovative solutions are showing the world what's possible, whether that means making your food safer, everyday products more sustainable, or interlayers that lighten electric vehicles and improve their range.
We're working hard to mitigate climate change and are committed to being carbon neutral by 2050. We have innovative products that will grow as the world decarbonizes. The Wall Street Journal and Barron's both named us one of the world's most sustainably managed companies, and we were listed in the top 25 of the 2021 Fortune Change the World list. Eastman is a leader in the circular economy. We're on track to complete the world's largest polyester molecular recycling facility by the end of 2022.
When you think about our employees, generations have been part of the Eastman family. We have accelerated our commitment to inclusion and diversity and constantly earn honors as a top employer. We were named one of the world's most ethical companies for the seventh time. Our employees and our company have proven to be resilient during difficult and tough times.
We've also transformed from within by strengthening our execution capabilities and improving our cost structure, and we're making digital products to meet customer needs for the twenty-first century. Core is a digital platform that helps our customers improve the accuracy and efficiency of film cutting for paint protection film. We've come a long way since George Eastman founded our company as part of Kodak in 1920, and we're looking forward to showing you how much farther we plan to go.
We've all heard the bad news. Climate change is real. Single-use plastic is filling landfills, being incinerated, and leaking into the environment. We have microplastics being found everywhere, including our food system and in drinking water. Problem materials are being banned, and we see a massive push to move from fossil to bio-based feedstocks. There's a drive for recycled content in all products. Solutions are desperately needed to care for society, and consumers are demanding a better way. There's also plenty of good news. Solutions exist now that can help address each of these problems, and the market is demanding them. Eastman cellulosic materials offer solutions the world needs. Today, our cellulosics are 60% bio-based, 40% waste plastic. They're naturally biodegradable, they're compostable, and they will not persist in the environment.
Leveraging more than 100 years of expertise in cellulosic innovation, our solutions are now addressing big challenges in multiple applications, sustainable fibers for clothing, bio-based microbeads in body wash and face creams, and compostable packaging. Eastman Aventa radically outperforms other products in home and industrial composting. Reducing food and packaging waste, which are often thrown out together, can cut landfill methane, a major contributor to climate change. There is plenty of good sustainability news, and that is great news for all of us.
The future of the automotive industry is electric, and Eastman is well ahead of the curve. We're solving problems others have yet to define, like understanding the science behind what is quiet and how to overcome a cabin environment filled with wind, road, and traffic noise. It's understanding that humans hear by context, our brains fill in missing sounds. That won't work with voice-activated commands, especially in a car filled with outside noise. Eastman Saflex enhanced acoustic interlayers enable that quiet interior, so a car's voice recognition can make out every syllable in every word. We're developing solar interlayers that create the premium cabin environment and enable the driving range consumers expect. We enable the advanced autonomous driving features of tomorrow with interlayers designed specifically for new advanced heads-up displays, creating an immersive and safer driving experience.
We're doing these things and more to create multifunctional interlayers that allow our industry partners to solve unique needs of electric vehicles. It is our growth model in action. World-class technology platforms, deep application knowledge, and relentless market engagement. We are making advances and will continue to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. The future of the industry is electric, and Eastman is positioned to win.
Today, brands are recognizing that consumers want sustainable products in all industries, and they're willing to change the materials they use to remain competitive in the marketplace. They're not willing to compromise on the material's performance, things like durability, color, or safety, and they shouldn't have to. Plastics recycled with traditional methods are often downcycled, and they struggle to meet the stringent requirements of high-performance applications. By using molecular recycling, Eastman transforms plastic waste into durable, advantaged, high-quality products with an infinite life. This means our specialty materials are uniquely positioned to provide sustainability without compromising quality for brands like BLACK+DECKER. BLACK+DECKER chose Tritan Renew with certified recycled material for their new Reviva line to satisfy their and their customers' desires for sustainability. This is the first power tool with a powerful sustainability story, the latest example of how we're collaborating with market leaders.
Our team is leveraging technology and application development expertise to deliver sustainable solutions to an application that demands a high-performance material.
Partnering with Eastman to apply their Tritan Renew material to our BLACK+DECKER Reviva products has created the opportunity to reduce environmental impact while continuing to develop the performance, durability, and quality that our customers require. We're delighted to have found a long-term partner in Eastman, a company that will support and accelerate our wider, broader commitment to becoming a force for good in society.
Brands who want to meet consumer demand for sustainable materials can look to Eastman to make it happen. They don't have to wait. We're showing the world what's possible right now, and we're just getting started.
Right. Well, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. I want to welcome all of you back. Certainly very excited to be with you here today. I think you can sense the excitement from all of us, the presenters before me, myself as well, about the story that we have to tell today at Eastman. In my 25 years with the company, we've certainly never had a more exciting set of growth opportunities than what you see today here. I'm very excited about that, very excited to be part of our future, but I'm equally proud and excited about the work that our teams around the world in AFP and CI have done over the last three years to position these businesses for a very bright future. I'll spend the next 30 minutes covering that with you. Let's go ahead and get started. First let's talk about AFP.
AFP, we've been through a significant amount of transformation recently, as I've just said, but it's important to take a historical perspective first. If you look at the AFP performance, you saw that in Mark's presentation. Over the last decade, AFP has delivered a significant amount of growth for our company. We've also had our challenges. Two years ago, we shared with you that one-third of AFP is not strategically aligned with the rest of the business and with the future of our company, and we started taking action on that. I'm pleased to report to you today that a year later, we've been able to, during 2021, execute two definitive agreements on our tire additives business as well as our adhesives business. Really what we have left is a business that is far more focused.
You see the financials on the slide in front of you. About a $2.5 billion business with high teens EBIT margins that are positioned very nicely for growth. What's more important, of course, is on the left, a very resilient business, and we'll talk about that performance and what underpins that performance in a later slide. Part of that resiliency comes from a new market footprint. AFP had very heavy exposure to transportation. Transportation was 25% of the market. What you see now is transportation is still the largest, but by a very small margin. You really see more than half the business in AFP represented by three market segments, Transportation, Personal Care and Wellness, moving into second place, then Food Agriculture, followed by Building and Construction. Four total markets that constitute the majority of that business.
A very balanced footprint. It's very important in a wide variety of macroeconomic scenarios. Much more importantly, a footprint that's very well aligned with macro trends. It's very well aligned with opportunities to innovate, which is what we are about. If we talk since 2018, you know, resilient performance, how do you define resilient performance? If we were to define a test for resilient performance, you know, starting out with a trade war, KF, that's a good test. You wouldn't add a once-in-a-100-year pandemic to a standard test. Then let's do a once-in-a-100-year freeze in Texas, and let's constrain a supply chain like it's been constrained, and then let's see how you do. That actually did happen, ladies and gentlemen, and that's the performance behind you in this business.
Certainly when we say resilient performance, we have the numbers to prove it as you look at the historical performance of this more focused AFP. You might ask, how did we do that? The same way AM did that, which is outperform in our key markets. You look at our top three key markets, and we try to go broad at the overall market level. You see all the puts and takes. Coatings and Additives, when you put transportation together, that's a declining market. When we put architectural together, that's a growing market. We outperform that market. Likewise for Personal Care, likewise for Animal Nutrition.
At the same time, I mentioned earlier, we completed two definitive agreements, and we actually closed on the divestiture of tire additives on November 1, and we're positioned to close on adhesives during Q1 of 2022. Significant amount of revenue, significant amount of work, and the disruption that comes from that happened by our teams during 2021, but very pleased with the outcome of that also with the multiple that we were able to generate from those two transactions. What's also happened during that time is our brand engagement has continued to evolve and continued to strengthen. Our innovation platforms have progressed, and we'll talk about that in a more quantitative way in a later slide.
Let's first do the recap of our innovation model. We're not gonna repeat what you've heard about this up until now, whether it was in Mark's presentation or in Steve's or in Brad's. I do wanna tell you how this has changed from 2018. The short answer for the next minute of my presentation is it's all changed for the better. Let's talk about how. The technology platforms that we have in AFP, cellulosic-based biopolymers, polyesters that are used in coatings, and then our amines technology. Materials that compete with these products are being deselected by the marketplace, not necessarily only through our efforts, but in general, consumers are moving and customers are moving away from competing materials. This creates a growth opportunity for us that is only accelerating as we move forward.
You've heard a lot this morning on the right-hand side of this about brand owner engagement. Brand owners are highly motivated. They're under a lot of pressure, whether it's from NGOs, whether it's from their customers, whether it's from the consumers, whether it's from their own goals and their obligations that they have put on themselves towards society, but they are highly motivated to innovate. They're looking for solutions. They're looking for partners. What's not changed is what's in the middle, which is we're on the same trajectory on investment, but we have that brand, we have that presence, we have the applications development to be able to link our technology platforms to the market need, and you'll see that in the several stories that I will share with you today.
When we look at this growth model, we look at how that translates and how do we outperform markets at the product level. At the product level in our key markets, we see strong growth. Whether we're talking about automotive coatings, driving our specialty ketones that are used in refinish and waterborne coatings, also in other applications in coatings or care additives for animal nutrition. Our multigeneration product planning, our growth efforts in this area really have paid off. You see some of this growth as higher than the market growth. I know a lot of you are very quick with math. Why is that? It's what we talked about earlier. We are solving not only new problems with new applications where this growth is additive to the total, or in some cases, it's bringing a better solution to an existing problem.
The net result is still the same. It increases our relevance with our customers. It increases the resiliency of our business, the sustainability of our margins, the pricing power that we have that comes from that. All those things come from good multigeneration product planning and being able to maintain that relevance. To move into the businesses in AFP, I wanna talk first about coatings additives. Coatings additives is our largest segment. It's the segment where we have the most history. In this business, our relationship with coating formulators, because that's where it all begins, is that engagement in the marketplace in our innovation-driven growth model. Our relationship and our brand as a reliable, stable, consistent, high-quality supplier is second to none.
That brand goes back decades, and that brand was only strengthened when we had a Texas freeze, a storm where we came through with flying colors from that, did much better than many of our competitors in stepping up and serving our customers. What I'm most proud of, though, is a brand that we've added over the last five years, and the brand that we've added over the last five years is built around being an innovation partner. We are now viewed by the coatings formulators as a key partner that is at the table with them solving their most burning problems. If you look at what those are, what some of those solutions are, you see them behind me on the slide. It begins with offering solutions on metal packaging for food packaging.
The world is moving away from BPA, and Tetrashield is providing an answer to that for them to be able to still package canned foods or vegetables or drinks with the same kind of durability that they're used to with epoxy coatings. Tetrashield is offered in industrial coatings to have more durable coatings that require less service, less frequent painting. We bring that solution to the table. I talked about specialty ketones that enable waterborne refinish coatings. Our full line of Optifilm products that are used in architectural coatings. These are paint coalescents that our customers can now choose a wide variety of products where they can control odor, they can control emissions, they can control properties in general of their coatings. That's a line, again, that's growing very nicely, experienced significant growth.
Newer trends that we're seeing is one that you see in the middle, this plastic film-free that you see behind me. If you think of a packaging of a premium perfume bottle that comes in a box, or if you think of your iPhone case, or if you think of a bottle of an alcoholic beverage, they usually have a clear film on the outside. That's a secondary package. That's a film. That's a single-use package. That's something that there is a strong desire to be able to eliminate. The way you eliminate that, and you still have a premium package with this transfer metallized packaging, and it's really making that paper package have that metallic look and a premium feel. That's a technology that has been in use for the last few years.
We've developed that working with customers, but really the latest trend on eliminating single-use packaging has driven a substantial amount of growth in that arena. Then last but not least on the right, the digitization of everything and the relocation of semiconductor supply chains into the Western world is driving a lot of growth in our EastaPure family of semiconductor treatment products. That's another area we're very excited about. You put it all together in a very exciting story for a business that has very high and stable margins in our portfolio. It's key to AFP's success, and it's one that continues to be positioned well for the future. Let's talk about one such platform that drives this growth. We've talked to you a little bit about this before, and this is our Tetrashield platform.
You've heard about our Tritan growth, and you've seen how substantial that growth in Tritan is. That growth has come from replacing BPA-containing alternate materials. When you look today on the shelves, products that contain BPA are no longer used to a very high degree, if any, in food packaging. Products that contain BPA, as in epoxy resins, are still used in can coatings that are used for beverage or for foods. The reason that adoption has not happened as quickly is if you think of a water bottle, it contains a liquid in it for a short period of time. A can that sits on the shelf, maybe 1-2 years, that it has to have shelf life. That testing, that production is much, much more stringent and the qualification cycle is much longer.
However, the desire is just as strong to move away from BPA. Solutions to date have required customers to make trade-offs, have required customers to either shorten the shelf life or adapt the manufacturing process because the products are not as flexible in the manufacturing process. We at Eastman, I think if you've picked up one theme so far this morning, we're not about asking our customers to make trade-offs. We try to offer these trade-off free solutions, and that's where Tetrashield comes in. The market opportunity is still significant, more significant than it was last time we talked to you. Our progress continues to be made in this area, but I wanna turn it over to Mahendra Dorairaj, I'll introduce via video our business President for our Coatings business to talk to you about the Tetrashield story.
The metal packaging market is experiencing tremendous growth. Beverage can growth by itself is expected to accelerate through 2024. This growth is driven by accelerating trends such as specialty shapes, a growing adoption of aluminum cans for new categories like hard seltzers, and strong sustainability drivers for this highly recyclable packaging. These metal cans' performance relies on robust coatings to protect shelf life, food quality, and consumer perceptions. For decades, those coatings have been based on BPA epoxy. The accelerating conversion to non-BPA linings has created a tremendous challenge for the packaging industry and a great opportunity for the leader in protective resin technology. Eastman's portfolio of Tetrashield resins enables high performance non-BPA linings for even the hardest to hold products. Our integrated raw material position and our manufacturing expertise based on decades of specialty polyester production supports supply peace of mind.
When you have a global supplier that is very fast in response and very ready to support you, is very important for us. We notice an increasing of development in terms of sustainability material or sustainable chemistry, and this is for us very important and help also us to increase the level of our development and our progress.
As we surpass well over 1 billion food cans and counting, our future in this space is bright. Eastman offers extraordinary performance with the portfolio breadth and scale to serve the world, and that is what we intend to do.
With that, let's spend a moment talking about the business model. How do we develop a technology like Tetrashield, how do we monetize this, and how do we actually engage in the market? If I wanted to explain our innovation growth driven model to a new audience, I would use Tetrashield or Tritan as the example because they both are the textbook example of how this works. It starts out with advantaged technology platforms. In this case, three, just like in the case of Tritan, acetyls, polyesters, and olefins coming together. The outcome is unique, new to the world and IP protected monomers. From new monomers, you make new polymers. But when you make new polymers, you end up with what a colleague of mine used to call wonder polymers, which is, I wonder what it's good for.
How do you get from a wonder polymer to actually making money on it is you need two more things. You need relentless market engagement, being in the application, understanding what the market actually needs, what are the end uses in the market, and then especially in the case of Tetrashield, you need applications development formulation. If you think of a can coating, you might think that's a pretty boring application. Well, if you think how you end up from a flat sheet of metal that's coated into a can, there's a whole lot of abuse that coating goes through in that manufacturing process at a speed that you really can't see with the naked eye. There's a lot of resistance there. You put something in a can, you put it on the shelf for two years.
You can't look inside until it's two years later. That's another place where you really need a lot of applications development to develop that. Again, different foods have different properties. What works for an easy to hold food doesn't work for a hard to hold food. The easy open ends on a beverage can, same story. Those need to tear just right and the coating needs to tear just right. A lot of applications development know-how that needs to be brought to bear there. That all has been brought to bear in Tritan with a lot of engagement. You saw a testimonial from one of our customers, Metlac. With that, obviously the proof is in the pudding, but what we're pleased to report to you is 2021 volumes for Tritan were three times 2020.
Now, 2020 on an absolute basis, of course, we're starting off of a lower base, but we're starting to become material to Tritan as we go through this plan to AFP. As we go through the planning period, we're gonna see these volumes continue to grow. I would also remind you that 2020, this is the one business where 2020 is not an easy comp. The canned foods business was very strong in that period, and so comparing and continuing to grow from that base is certainly something that has us very excited. Shifting gears from coatings to care additives. Care Additives is a business that really came together as a business, as a industry vertical, so to speak, or market vertical in Eastman by the acquisition of Taminco.
Eastman had a lot of history themselves in Personal Care ingredients, in food ingredients and in pharmaceutical excipients. Taminco had their own history, but none of us had that critical mass to be able to really be relevant with those formulators, with those brand owners. About four or five years ago, we started investing deliberately in this business, started building that applications development competence and really leveraging the individual positions that the two businesses had with the major formulators, major brand owners, and start to grow from that. It's certainly a business that's earlier on in its growth trajectory than coatings, but the future is just as exciting. Just to give you an example of a very exciting part of that future, that starts with the challenge that the world is facing today. I think all of you have heard about the microplastics challenge.
Microplastics are defined as less than 5-millimeter little fragments of plastic, but these microplastics are really present in a lot of products that we use today. If you just think of home care, personal care, Europe alone has 42,000 tons of microplastics that are being used. What we're focusing on here is cosmetics and personal care. In cosmetics and personal care, these little beads are being used, and they really help with the properties of the cosmetic and personal care product, whether it's anti-aging, whether it's exfoliating, whether it's moisturizing, they're an essential part of that formula, especially when it's a leave-on cosmetic where sensory feel is very, very important. There are few alternatives. These products eventually, obviously, after they get used, they end up in the water system.
From the water system, they end up into marine life, end up in the food chain, and then the whole thing ends up in a circle. Obviously that's something undesirable for society, and that creates a challenge that results in a significant opportunity. Consumers are aware of this, so there's a lot of consumer sentiment on this, but there's also a ban that's being talked about in Europe. As you can imagine, what this does is this creates a huge disruption to a very, very large industry. When a large industry is disrupted like that, it certainly creates that persistent unmet needs. If you have a societal macro trend and you have a persistent unmet need, for us at Eastman, there's one more thing that's needed for us to get excited, and that's that intersection with a technology platform we have.
The intersection for Eastman for that technology platform is with our bio-based cellulosic materials that really offer the balance of properties that are needed, and I'll talk about what that is later. What's the price? The price here at maturity is $100 million of EBITDA opportunity for solving this problem, and that's what we view our share can be of that solution. Why do we think we can solve this problem? First, let's define the problem. What is the problem? The problem is these microbeads end up in marine life. The way you take care of that, if you remember from Steve's slide, he talked about Naia biodegradation and the work that we've done with Woods Hole, is biodegradability.
If the products completely biodegrade, not as in break into smaller particles, but actually completely biodegrade, that is the solution. The equivalent of the EPA in Europe, the European Chemicals Agency, has developed a test or has adopted a test where biodegradability is defined, because it means a lot of things to a lot of people, but now we actually have a test. It's referred to as the 60/60 test. 60 days, 60% biodegradability is the name of the game, and it's what is required to be able to be used in the application to be considered biodegradable. Cellulosic materials in general are known to be biodegradable. The fact that we can make a cellulosic material that's biodegradable, yeah, I wouldn't be here talking to you about that. That would not be news to anybody.
The fact that the existing product used for microbeads, whether that's PMMA or the best-in-class product, nylon 12, the fact that they're not biodegradable, that's not news either. We know both of those things. However, that's not where the story ends, clearly, and that's not why we have a growth opportunity. The reason we have that is because there are more performance requirements than just biodegradability. A good proxy for the performance requirement is oil absorption. Oil absorption not only is a good proxy for how the product is going to work, how much ingredient you can load into the product, but the sensory feel of that leave-on cosmetic is what's driven by that oil absorption.
Best in class is nylon 12, and since we're all about no trade-offs for customers, we basically took it upon ourselves as a challenge to make a cellulosic formula that absorbs the same amount of oil as nylon 12, yet passes the biodegradability test. As you can see, the formula on the right does that, our Eastman cellulosic material. You can see on the graph on the left-hand side that we are able to pass the biodegradability test. Obviously, there's a lot of tuning that can be done and trading off between those properties, and that's also what we can do working with our customers in specific formulas. We have demonstrated that we can have a solution for our customers that requires them to make no trade-offs in their application. We're certainly very excited about this project. Shifting gears slightly to feed additives.
Our animal nutrition business, I think you saw that on the product growth chart that I showed earlier, that it's starting to show up on the same scale in a material way with products where we've been around for many years in our coatings business. What underpins that? What underpins our animal growth? Well, we started out with organic acids. The world is moving away from antibiotics. It's moving away in Europe due to regulatory pressure, in the U.S., consumer sentiment. To maintain gut health, to maintain preservation and hygiene of grain, organic acids are being used. Eastman has had a history with organic acids, so we've sold, we have a very broad portfolio of organic acids. With the Taminco acquisition, we added more products to our product slate.
We were this product provider up until a few years ago when we started investing in applications development. These are rapidly growing markets, but ultimately, to access that $2 billion market on the right, need way more than just organic acids, need the knowledge of formulation, need the knowledge of how all this works in the animal, what the impact is, and that's what the acquisition of 3F that we have announced is starting to put us on that trajectory. That, in addition to continued organic investment into our own capabilities. Obviously, we'll continue to look for bolt-on opportunities in this space, but this is certainly one that we're very excited about.
Rather than hear it from me, Sandeep Bangaru, the leader of our Business for Animal Nutrition, and our Marketing Director will be sharing with you some of their excitement and also their plans for the business via video. Eastman has one of the broadest organic acid portfolios in a global market that continues to expand. That's a big advantage as the animal production industry feeds a world population expected to grow from 8-10 billion people by 2050. There is also pressure to move away from antibiotics to increase feed and food biosecurity to be more sustainable and improve animal welfare. Eastman sees these challenges as opportunities. Our organic acid-based blends and derivatives, key components to antibiotic free diets, show 20%-30% year-over-year growth.
We've also broadened our portfolio to provide overall gut health and hygiene control instead of single products for isolated problems. In May, we acquired 3F Feed & Food, whose agile manufacturing let them rapidly design and deploy products to capture 50% of the market in Spain and Portugal. We have expanded our regional teams to get close to customers in new markets. No matter the problem, Eastman is committed to providing tailored solutions by region, even by farm. Our technical capability and application expertise, combined with Eastman's integrated production model, paves the way for future growth and expansion.
Let's talk again about the business model here and why we're doing what we're doing. Again, this should ring familiar to you. You should see a lot of parallels and similarities between different businesses in Eastman. This is the model Brad was talking about that underpins our films business. How do you start with a basic product, add more offerings, and then build on the value delivered? We start with organic acids and move where we are today. We've already moved a lot of our business to our synergistic formulations. We add more ingredients, we make a formulation that actually can be used. The value add is significant.
From there, it's about controlled delivery, and controlled delivery at a very simple level here is to get past the aggressive conditions in the stomach into the intestine of the animal and to have the activity occur there. So that's the key when it comes to controlled release. Once you can do that, which we have technologies already commercialized in that area, more value to be delivered. Ultimately, the prize is to get all the way to the right, where you deliver a complete data package, a complete solution for the animal health to the farmer. That's where we're trying to move. You can see the multipliers on the bottom, and you can certainly understand not only our excitement, but also some of the valuations that you see in the marketplace for pure plays in this space.
To complete the tour of AFP, Specialty Fluids and Energy is another segment in AFP. Won't spend a lot of time on this other than to tell you that this is a great business. It's positioned for nice growth. I will remind you, when you compare 2021 to 2018 in AFP, we're still missing international aviation. That's poised to come back. We have leading positions in aviation and in heat transfer fluids that give us very nice growth. Most recently, we've added digital tools with Fluid Genius and our heat transfer fluids that really enable us to do more heat management instead of just selling a fluid and working with our customers to give them a lot of data about their own process and the life of their fluids. Very excited about this.
When we put it all together for AFP, what do you get after all this? Specialty products growing at two times the market. This should ring familiar by now for us as a strategy in Eastman, AFP, and especially the new focused AFP, well-poised with growth programs to deliver on this trajectory. Getting our EBIT margins to approach 20% as we continue to grow through the planning period is certainly something that we are committing to. To get there, we're committing to deliver 6%-8% EBIT growth, and you'll certainly see us do better than that as we move into 2022. With that, let me move to CI real quick. I'm a firm believer that any business needs to know their role in the portfolio.
Erwin Dijkman, our President for CI, and the entire CI team know their place in the portfolio for CI. CI is the engine room of the Eastman innovation machine. When we talk about AM or we talk about AFP monomers that constitute Tritan, monomers that constitute Tetrashield are born in CI. When we talk about micro beads, the intermediates that make those micro beads are born in CI. When we talk about our personal care products in care solutions, same thing, we start out in CI. Most innovations that you talk about require some kind of tweak in our intermediates to make a new molecule that ultimately generates a market solution, solving a problem. Our circular feedstocks are another factor that involves CI assets. Again, a lot there that CI brings to the table.
We also tend to talk about CI as olefins and acetyls, and we tend to forget that 30% of CI, in fact, is functional amines and specialty plasticizers. These are businesses that have high growth. We invest more capital in these businesses. Our olefins and our acetyls are more consumed to make specialties. We don't look necessarily to grow those. There's an internal mix here in CI that's happening as well with amines and specialty plasticizers. I'll talk a little bit about that later. To be a good member of the Eastman family and to be that engine room that we talked about, there are certain requirements that we understand very well. One is that engine room's gotta be really efficient and reliable. What that means, operational cost improvements, absolutely important. We've taken action to improve our global footprint. Singapore site is what we closed.
That was not an advantage cost structure, not integrated like the rest of the business, so non-strategic, so we closed that. Our supply chain is a large North America exporter. CI is certainly one that's been key to make sure that we enabled a lot of the performance that we've had in very constrained supply chains. Improving that cost to serve, improving our network is very important, and it's something that continually we work on and we worry about in CI. The mix improvement, we've talked about two elements there. One is growing this 30%, and then the other one is extracting ourselves from the Asia oxo market. Both net improved our mix. The most important part that I know is near and dear to all of your heart is to not have a whole lot of volatility, a whole lot of noise from the engine room.
It needs to be quiet down there. That's something else that we have done. We've invested in RGP. RGP has reduced our exposure to merchant ethylene. We've increased our share of cost pass-through contracts in the business. What I wanna talk to you about today is we have begun a new investment on ethylene to propylene, and yes, it is as exciting as the name makes it sound. We'll go to that later, but before we get there, let me just touch on the 30% of CI. The larger part of that 30% of CI that's growing is functional amines. This business came to us via the Taminco acquisition. It's a business that has continued to deliver, has continued to grow very stable earnings. One of the reasons that is our partnership with Corteva.
It's one of our newest initiatives where we're continuing to invest. We had a recent capital expansion and a startup during 2021 of additional capacity for this product. Enlist is a herbicide that's very successful in the market, and in our mantra of winning with customers, this is a great example where we are working with Corteva, helping them win in the marketplace. This business is positioned to continue to grow into next year, not only helping CI with the growth, but overall improving the mix of the business. Now to EtoP. EtoP, ethylene to propylene. What is this? This is exactly what the name says. This is you have the choice or the flexibility. This is not a change. This is an added flexibility, so we can go back and forth just like we can with RGP.
We have the choice to make propylene instead of ethylene. That's the chemical engineers. I apologize for oversimplifying it, but that is basically the simple version of what we are doing here. Why is that so important? Well, let's start back to what is CI's role in the specialty portfolio, and it was defined to me by one of our business presidents from our specialty businesses, which is we've got to make the most stable propylene that we can in a very reliable way, in a cost-effective way. Pretty simple. Notice one word they didn't mention was ethylene. It's all about the propylene. That's what we have to do. That actually is easy to do unless you have to produce ethylene along the way, and then you're exposed to the ethylene volatility.
The problem for us historically has been the ethylene volatility because the ethylene market changes significantly. RGP reduced the amount of merchant ethylene that we produce. That was a good thing, a good step in the right direction. That project has already paid for itself. It's been a great investment. However, there's still an amount of merchant ethylene that's available today. E2P completes that circle. The way you should think about this now, if you look at the chart on the right, is we have operating modes for any ethylene market scenario. If ethylene spreads are very high, we can certainly go back to the old way of running, run our crackers in normal cracker mode and be able to produce ethylene and take advantage of that market. If on the other hand, ethylene margins are extremely compressed, we can avoid that downside volatility.
We can turn on E2P and not produce any merchant ethylene. Obviously, if it's in between, we can alternate with RGP and with E2P and with normal cracker operation. Net, at least one way you can think about E2P is you almost start running like a PDH unit. The big difference between E2P and a PDH unit is one you guys will appreciate the most, and that is the capital. The capital for E2P is something around the $50 million range, which if you think of PDH capital, that's orders of magnitude higher than that.
Very big difference, a very cost-effective way to get that volatility out of the system and to really complete our flexibility. If we put all this together for CI to try to quantify what this means, we started out, and again, these you'll have to bear with me, we try to normalize these EBITs in normal market conditions, but what you can take comfort in is these are like for like comparisons. In 2017, 2018, we started out with a, you know, ±30% kind of business. As we've done RGP, as we've done cost savings, asset closures, other things, we've gone to a ±20% business.
As we invest into E2P, as we move with additional cost savings, but also, you see the yellow bars, give up some capacity to our downstream businesses, we end up with a business that has a normalized EBIT that's actually higher than where we sit today and a far reduced earnings volatility. Certainly a transformation of the CI business that's very significant, one that we're very, very excited about. Before I wrap up, I want to once again thank my teams around the world, thank the teams in CI and AFP. As you can see, a lot has happened in the last 18-36 months in these businesses, a lot to be proud of. They have positioned these businesses for a very different growth trajectory going forward. You'll meet later the business presidents that are leading these teams.
I'm certainly very glad they're here today, and you get a chance to talk to them. With that, I appreciate your attention. I appreciate the opportunity to be able to talk to you today, and I'll turn it over to Willie to wrap it up.
Thanks, Lucian. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. It's great to be at this in-person event, as I'm sure all of us are a little tired of virtual conferences. While I've been at Eastman for 20 years and had various positions around the world, I became CFO in early 2020. When you think about becoming CFO in 2020, so far my entire tenure has been during the global pandemic. I've seen up close and personal what it takes for the Eastman team to be resilient. We've been steadfast in our focus on innovation growth. You've heard that today through the new business revenue from innovation, the mix upgrade, as well as the exciting growth in the circular economy. This is one of the most exciting times in Eastman's history. As you think about our.
As you look at the top of the slide, you'll see the five key themes from today. I hope we brought that to life for you. We've also summarized our reporting segment financial commitments. It's highlighted by the specialty growth above underlying end markets in Advanced Materials and Additives & Functional Products, as well as the increased normalized level of earnings in Chemical Intermediates, and strong growth in our Fibers business driven by textiles and improved margins. This really drives home the final outputs of the key themes today and the attractive specialty growth that we expect to deliver between now and 2024. Eastman has a strong track record for outstanding performance, and this slide is a great example of that. We've delivered solid performance since 2018 during a very challenging environment, and we expect to build upon that with growth as we enter 2022.
We also have a strong culture of peer benchmarking, and I think this slide will bring that to life for you. Mark highlighted the graph in the upper left-hand corner. Since 2018, our EBITDA margins have been in line with our specialty peers. It's not just EBITDA margins that are in line. As you look at the EPS CAGR since 2010, Eastman has outperformed our specialty peers. Also, we're a clear leader in free cash flow conversion, outperforming our specialty peers since 2018. Also, we've delivered this strong free cash flow in just about every economic environment. As we transition to ROIC, we've increased that here in 2021, and we're not gonna stop there. We expect to increase this over the next three years.
While our performance has been in line with our specialty peers, I would say we have a lot of upside from a valuation standpoint, looking at our historical performance as well as the compelling growth that we've outlined here for you today. That's the opportunity. It's not just. In addition to the compelling growth, we've also done a great job on the cost side. As you look at 2018 into next year, we project that we're gonna have greater than $600 million of structural cost savings. We're gonna achieve this productivity through four primary areas. First, we're enhancing our business operating model, where we are preferentially investing. We're empowering our business leadership teams and our centers of excellence around the company. As you heard Mark talk about earlier, we've made significant investments in our integrated business planning.
This is where we're connecting our business strategies to our operational plans. We continue to transform our operations by modernizing and digitizing our capabilities and strengthening our execution excellence. We've also optimized our manufacturing footprint around the world to better serve our customers, as well as to reduce our overall cost. In addition to productivity in 2022, we expect our variable compensation to normalize. Aggressive productivity is in the culture at Eastman, and it's a continuous process across the enterprise. We look to drive EPS growth through top line and our innovation. This efficiency funds our investments in growth as we shift our mix of resources to our robust growth portfolio. Next is one of my favorite topics, cash flow. I think we're building a strong record of performance here. The key takeaway of this slide is consistency, and we've delivered this in just about every environment.
In 2018, we were at record levels for operating cash flow. In 2019 and 2020, we only dipped slightly despite a global trade war and a global pandemic, and we're rebounding nicely here in 2021. Over the next three years, we expect to deliver approximately $5 billion in operating cash flow. That's about $1.6 billion per year and a new level of performance for Eastman. This new level of performance is driven by the earnings growth that we discussed here today, and we expect to be able to deliver this into the future. The operating cash flow is from the new business revenue that we discussed, and we expect to also be disciplined as we invest in capital on the organic side and also to be able to return meaningful cash flow to stockholders.
As we grow, we will have sustained working capital discipline in line with our growth. Over the coming years, we will not only be able to fund our attractive organic growth, but also return meaningful cash to stockholders. All else equal. Demand has rebounded quite substantially here in 2021, and as a result, we expect record revenue. As we've outlined today, we expect specialty growth in Advanced Materials and Additives & Functional Products to outpace our underlying markets. On top of that, we plan to add capital for our new vector of growth with the circular economy. As a result, you should expect our capital expense over the next several years to increase to fuel this growth. Additionally, our annual capital expenditures is about $300 million, and this continues to fund our reliability.
Also, as you look at recent history, our CapEx has been between $500 and $600 million. This enables us to expand in our product lines in Advanced Materials and Additives & Functional Products as they outpace the underlying markets. Also, you'll see on this chart a new vector of growth as highlighted for our circular economy investments. It's about $425 million for our Kingsport facility, and this is both for the methanolysis plant as well as the Tritan polyester facility. As we make these investments in both the Kingsport facility as well as the potential capital in additional circular economy projects, we expect the returns to be greater than 12%, and that our corporate ROIC will be greater than 12%-15%.
Mark highlighted this slide earlier, and when you look at it holistically, it's a strong track record of disciplined capital allocation at Eastman. As you compare our history in the chart on the left with our future in the chart on the right, two things are clear. First, we don't plan to use cash to delever in the future. Second, the pie is much bigger, which means we can invest in organic growth while also stepping up the returns to shareholders at the same time. Over the next three years, we expect to deploy greater than $6 billion of cash. This includes $1 billion from balance sheet capacity. This is from growing EBITDA over the forecast period. Additionally, we expect to put $1.8 billion in proceeds from our divestitures to work.
As you can see, over the upcoming period, we will be able to not only invest in organic growth, we will be able to add bolt-on acquisitions to our portfolio, as well as return significant cash to shareholders. As you look at the next slide, over the past three years, we've repaid about $1 billion in debt. This has strengthened our balance sheet. With a growing EBITDA, we've been able to improve our leverage metrics in line with an investment-grade credit rating. We plan to do whatever is necessary in the coming years to maintain a solid investment-grade balance sheet, which is the sweet spot for Eastman. As you look at the upcoming debt maturities, I'm confident these are manageable in the coming years.
Also, as you think about what we're doing at Eastman, we expect to be able to tap the green bond market and also have attractive rates. I do not expect that we will need to meaningfully delever any further over the coming years. Another source of value creation at Eastman has been portfolio management, and we've been active here over the last several years. As you heard from Lucian, we've divested our tire additives business, and we've announced the sale of our adhesives resins business. The combined revenue is $1.1 billion, and the EBITDA is $175 million. The proceeds from these transactions are expected to be $1.8 billion, resulting in a transaction multiple of greater than 10x. Also, we plan to put the proceeds to use in 2021 and 2022 to make these transactions neutral to slightly accretive to EPS.
We've added specialty bolt-ons to accelerate the growth in Additives & Functional Products and Advanced Materials. We've continued to show you our discipline with the multiples being about 8x. In 2022, we expect the revenue to be roughly $100 million from these acquisitions. Importantly, investing in growth organically, we have our Kingsport project, as well as the potential for projects in Europe and a second project in the U.S. We also expect to review our portfolio and have the highest and best owner mindset, which I think we've demonstrated recently with our portfolio actions. I would encourage you to look at our long history of returning cash to shareholders. We've developed a strong track record here. If you look at the dividend chart on the left, we've declared and paid a dividend every year since we've been a public company, which is since 1994.
We've had a track record for 11 consecutive years of increasing our dividend. With our announcement last week of a 10% increase in our dividend, next year will be the 12th. Also, you can see our history on the right of share repurchases. Last night, we announced a $500 million accelerated share repurchase program. We now expect share repurchases for 2021 to be $1 billion. This will also be from free cash flow and divestiture proceeds. In addition to the $1 billion in 2021, we expect to repurchase another $1 billion in 2022. With the strong free cash flow and the additional $2.5 billion of board authorized share repurchases, we expect to repurchase meaningful shares in 2023 and 2024.
As you put all of this together, it leads to discipline and balance across the management team and the company as we balance earnings, cash flow, and returns with innovation-driven growth at the center of it all. Returns is an important metric to strengthen. We have and are continuing to invest in growth. This is both organic growth and bolt-on M&A. We've also continued to optimize our portfolio, and over the next three years, we expect to increase our returns. We expect them to approach 15% ROIC in 2024. As you think about Eastman as an investment option, I would ask you to consider the significant financial flexibility that we have to invest in organic growth and return a significant amount of cash to stockholders.
The investment-grade balance sheet that we have and the sufficient liquidity to face any challenges and to serve as a strong foundation for growth. We're increasing our ROIC and expect it to approach 15% by 2024. We are a clear leader in the circular economy, and we're investing to make it a significant vector of growth. Finally, we have increased our consistency and reduced our volatility through strong execution to create value. Thanks for joining us today here in the room as well as online. I think Eastman is an excellent investment opportunity and look forward to discussing that with you at future conferences and events. With that, I'll turn it back over to Mark.
All right. We've had a long history of innovating, a long, proud history for Eastman or even going farther back than Kodak. We've transformed our portfolio in dramatic fashion through M&A and divestitures, and then through consolidating those acquisitions into a very powerful, innovative, growth-driven company. When you think about the five themes that we started this conversation with today, you heard them throughout all the presentations. First, innovation-driven growth model is delivering results historically. We're demonstrating and proving we can grow above our underlying markets in products that have higher margins that drive mix upgrade. The circular economy is something we're extremely excited about. You know, sometimes the world evolves, changes. In this case, a focus on driving a better planet is playing straight into Eastman's technologies in an extremely advantaged way for us to exploit across the entire portfolio.
The circular recycling technologies are exciting, the biopolymers are exciting, but keep in mind that we have sustainability-driven growth throughout the company. That really gets us a position to be a real environmental leader in how we address and solve these problems that also translates into extremely attractive returns for our investors. We're investing significantly in our carbon footprint to improve it and take that risk off the table and make us a more advantaged provider to our customers, and we're building the capabilities to make sure that we can grow and execute as we move forward. It produces a lot of cash. In the end, companies' values are based on their cash, and ours is compelling. We're gonna continue to be disciplined and balanced in how we deploy it.
When you think about all this together, it's a very attractive return for investors and one we're really excited about. I would say that the last thing I wanna emphasize about this is that you're only as good as your team, right? I have one of the best executive teams in the industry who've made it possible for me to stand up here and talk about this overall strategy and the value creation that's possible. The teams around the world are what make this possible. It's just an incredible place to work, and the reason I joined Eastman is because of the way people come together and work as teams and are focused on what makes the company succeed every day.
I can tell you that through all this chaos that we've been through, it's just remarkable how they come to work every day and they solve incredibly difficult problems. At the same time, they keep the growth going, and at the same time, they build capabilities for the future. I just think it's, you know, for me personally, I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to represent them and represent this story and this investment opportunity to you. What we're gonna do now is shift to Q&A. What I'm gonna do is ask the presenters to join me here on the stage as I try and field questions and hand them out to my team where it makes sense. All right. Let's open it up to questions. John.
Thanks. John Roberts from UBS. Mark, margins for Naia fiber and some of the other new cellulosics are lower than cig tow margins that's there. Do the margins continue to come down? Where do they stabilize in that segment as you do the transition?
Brad, would you take that?
Sure. John, actually, I'm very pleased to share that on Naia, we've actually normalized it about a level roughly close to tow, if not a little bit better.
That's Tom.
That's obviously a function of two things, to be very transparent. You know, over time, tow margins came down. They've stabilized. We've certainly made dramatic improvement in the Naia margins. It's really the quality of the value proposition. You see it winning the market. We continue to grow double digit, and we've moved prices up, you know, over that time period as well, and as well, launched more innovative offerings, so.
Secondly, in interlayers, Corning's now getting Gorilla Glass into OEM applications. Your interlayers work with Gorilla Glass, and is that a substantially higher margin opportunity?
You know, I think it's more of a niche opportunity at this point. It's been talked about for a long time. I have not seen it gain a lot of momentum. We have had some applications where we can work in it. It depends on kinda what the application is. Very early stage.
Great. David?
Thank you, Frank. Thank you. David Begleiter, Deutsche Bank. Mark, you have a growing portfolio of potentially very valuable high multiple businesses and some very low multiple businesses as well. How do you think about making sure you get paid going forward for these higher margin, higher multiple businesses not being dragged down by these lower multiple businesses going forward?
Yeah, it's a great question, David. We're always focused on how we can be a disciplined manager of our portfolio, and so you just saw that discipline in exiting the tires and adhesive businesses, which we viewed as non-strategic. We're incredibly excited about the portfolio we're putting forward. When you look at Advanced Materials, AFP, and even how we're stabilizing and positioning Fibers to start modestly growing, a vast majority of our portfolio is gonna be delivering very stable, very high attractive growth, that certainly deserves a very good valuation. The circular economy is just a huge, big adder to that.
When you think about the circular contracting model, which is very similar to an Airgas model of, you know, contracting and securing stable spreads and deploying that level of capital with very high returns, I think it also deserves a very good value. CI is obviously part of that story. As Lucian said, you know, it is now becoming a very small percentage of the total story. It actually provides some margin stability when you actually look at flex in value and change, you know, so it actually has stabilized our earnings in the way it's played out. It provides an incredibly important value driver for how we grow.
When we focus on everything we're doing today around circular, around specialty, you know, that's where our attention is, and that is the vast majority of our earnings now, and it's gonna become a bigger percent every day we move forward. That's really where our focus is at this time. We think at this time, you know, it makes sense, you know, in how the portfolio is configured.
Right. Just on M&A, how is the bolt-on pipeline looking? Where's your focus, and what are your thoughts on something maybe larger transformational down the road for Eastman? Thank you.
Wow. The two big questions. We are very focused on how we deploy capital in a disciplined way. As I said, the organic specialty strategy is attractive. The circular plants we think are extremely attractive when you look at that EBITDA of $450 million relative to about $2 billion of CapEx around it. We are always looking for bolt-on M&A, and we'll continue to do so. The rest, you know, as we said, is increasing dividends and share purchases. We are not looking at large M&A at this stage. We look at the opportunities we have organically are the best deployments right now in scale.
If you look at the history of value creation for companies, organic growth is the most powerful way to create value for our owners, and that's what we think we can do. All right. Frank?
Yeah. Mark, the team put forth a lot of impressive growth areas in the circular using your circular technology. I think the one that stood out for me was in food packaging. The applications there are fairly limitless, I think, and I think it was part of what you were saying that you wanted to get to, like, $200 million of EBITDA by 2026, something like that. I was curious if you could drill down a little bit more into that specific application and how do you see that growing, and where are your price points relative to where the space is today? Is that a limiting factor in terms of, you know, what you're offering there? 'Cause it does seem like that could really be a very significant grower.
Yeah, we're really excited about it, and we do think it's a significant growth opportunity. I'm gonna let Steve cover a bit of it, as it's in that earlier stage of development, but tremendous engagement we're seeing from the food service companies.
Yeah. I mean, it is a platform that we're very excited about because we, you know, as we talked, cellulosics has always been biodegradable, but, as we've studied that particular area, we've now learned to formulate that particular product line to where it'll actually compost, home and industrial, as I mentioned. You got big drivers right around food waste, but it's not just food service, it's any type of food packaging. I mean, if you go into the grocery store and look at all of the containers itself. We've continued to invest in the technology, think about ways to, you know, provide rigidity and to downcycle or actually thin out the materials. We think we're actually cost competitive as well.
Food service is the first segment, but we are gonna translate all the way across, and as you can imagine, that's a massive addressable market.
Yeah. There's no shortage of opportunity there. I'd also emphasize that where we're building significant capital investment on the polyester side of circular, on the cellulosics side, we're leveraging existing infrastructure, right? We have a lot of growth capability with the infrastructure we have in place to sort of serve that market and the micro beads and everything else. Go ahead, Frank.
Yeah. The other area I wanted to drill into a little bit is, you know, I believe you mentioned you have 125 suppliers of waste plastics already signed up to supply the methanolysis unit, logistics being an area that I don't believe that you have a lot of experience in right now in handling waste plastics into Kingsport. Can you talk about, you know, how you envision getting the materials in? I assume that this is in a relatively finite distance around Kingsport. I mean, we're probably not shipping from the West Coast to Kingsport in terms of accessing that material.
Just to give some more comfort that you will be able to access the waste material you need to run that facility, you know, as well as you can.
Sure. I'll let Brad take that.
Yeah, sure. First of all, I mean, I think we have great logistics experience if you think about what we do around the world being such a North American supplier. We're leveraging that, so you are talking, Frank, a very big supply chain here. We aren't required to kinda bring it from just close by because this stuff has very little value. I referenced Circular Polymers where we're bringing carpet. That's a good example. We are bringing that from the West Coast all the way over using rail, but we can afford to do that. That's a very competitive feedstock relative to fossil fuel and relative to really other sources.
You know, we haven't been, you know, as transparent as some of you like, I realize, on what we're doing on feedstocks, and that's for good reason because it's a big part of our competitive advantage, and so it's really how we bring that mix in. I feel very good about where we're at. We have the warehousing capability. We've already been leveraging our pilot plant to you know, go through the qualification process. Feel good 12 months out where we sit and very confident we'll be in great position by next year.
I mean, one of the advantages to keep in mind here, especially for these sort of first three plants we're talking about, is we have a huge first-mover advantage, right? For the world of polyester, there's a lot of people doing sort of pyrolysis for olefins, but in polyester, you know, we're the only large scale player on the planet doing this, right? There's a bunch of startups that are still trying to, you know, figure out how to scale up their technology, and that's why the brands are so connected to us. It's also a huge advantage in how we work with all the feedstock suppliers is we can show up and commit to contracts, you know, a year from now, you know, that we can help them scale up that infrastructure.
One of the big problems we have globally, but especially in the U.S. and Europe, is the recycling infrastructure is not where it needs to be. Today, they only make value on the mechanical slice, that 16%. The rest is going to landfill or incineration if you're in Europe. We can put value on that broader stream and allow them to view their economics in a fundamentally different and better way to sort of get better at investing in technology for separation and making this available. It creates a very virtuous cycle as companies start to scale up on this for them to be able to serve it. You know, we feel good in the first plants because, you know, we have a sort of first-mover advantage in securing that feedstock. All right, next question. Kevin?
Kevin McCarthy, Vertical Research Partners. First question's on Tritan. It looks as though that business continues to grow quite rapidly. I think you said 54% over the last three years, you know, a few questions. What do you think the long-term market opportunity is? I guess we'll be crossing through half a billion, if that hasn't already happened, pretty soon. Do you see this as, I don't know, a multi-billion dollar opportunity over some period of time? How should we think about that? With regard to the 80-kiloton plant that you're building, do you need monomer as well, or can you leverage the building blocks coming out of methanolysis? Maybe you can just talk about, you know, what percentage is Renew versus not Renew and how those premiums are fluctuating.
Sure. A lot embedded in there, Kevin. Let me start with kind of the end in terms of the intermediates. It really goes in hand with that investment in the methanolysis. You know, we'll see how that plays out over time, you know, as we get to the end of the build out, what our monomer situation is. It depends on recycled content. Today we're really you know, trying to leverage this precious content we have and even as we scale it up more at the 50% recycled content. But a lot of demands even in durables, a lot of the customers in durables are demanding 100%, so that would push that up a little bit. When you think about the growth trajectory, you know, I think we're still poised for double-digit growth.
It's certainly not gonna be the kind of growth I just showed you. Some of that was the takeoff as brands start looking for alternatives to materials of concern. But I think we're, you know, poised for double-digit growth in the foreseeable future. Think about that 10%+ type of range is what I expect it to continue to grow going forward.
Okay. My second question was on the E2P project that you announced. I mean, it seems as though that could have an extraordinary impact in diminishing volatility, for I think you said a $50 million investment. My simple question would be, you know, what has changed to allow you to do that? Did you develop new technology or license it? You know, how is it different from metathesis? I think there are some companies out there that basically create two propylene molecules from three ethylene molecules. Is that what you're doing? Maybe you could just elaborate on how you get there from here.
Sure.
Lucian?
Yeah. I won't be able to talk about the details of the technology, but what I can tell you is it is a licensed technology that we're using. It's a technology that has been demonstrated. Obviously something that we have a lot of confidence in. In terms of what's changed, a number of things have changed. Again, there's a gradual progression. We had E2P, there was technology in our hands. Why was that available is because of some other investments we made ahead of that were frankly unrelated to RGP. We made those investments, it enabled RGP. Once we had RGP, we deployed that and we learned how to flexibly run the assets. This technology came along on E2P that was available to us via license. We've taken advantage of that and now we're implementing.
It's been kind of a continual journey of adding flexibility to the stream. The other reason why now, as you can imagine, is we have feedstock contracts that come into the stream so that you have to manage those. Actually, the asset flexibility that we're generating is very quick. It's, we can switch between these very, very quickly. You have to line up whether you need a whole bunch of RGP to buy or whether you're buying PGP or whether you're running E2P and you have to set up selling ethylene. All the commercial side needs to work in line with that. Some of those agreements are longer term, so we've had to line all that up so that it works together with the need to be investment, so that once we have it, we can take full advantage of it.
Thank you.
All right. I can't see who it is in the back, but we'll go to the back. Bright lights up here.
Yeah. To infinity and beyond.
Exactly. So look, we're focused on delivering what we have in our sites right now. Clearly these three projects is a substantial deployment of capital for us, and it has, you know, very attractive EBITDA, as you can see. Obviously, these three plants, you know, are just the start of solving this problem on the planet. The need to scale up and build additional plants beyond these first three is gonna be very strong and very present for the next decade. It's reasonable to expect that we build additional plants. I'm not gonna get into how many, you know, today. I'd just like to get these first three built and, you know, and producing this EBITDA.
Clearly the level of engagement we're seeing, and it's not just U.S. and Europe, but it's also in Asia, where people wanna try and, you know, have a solution to this. Mechanical is not a long-term solution. It's a great solution for a specific set of needs in the marketplace, as Steve said, but the polymer degrades in that process. So we're necessary just to keep polymer alive for mechanical recycling and revitalizing it. And so there's a role for this, and I think we are really well positioned in the polyester stream, to keep doing it. But yeah, no, I wouldn't assume there's three plants and done. I think there's more plants that come, you know, after this.
You know, I think we wanna be able to announce and be specific around these three, get them built, and then we'll talk more about what comes next.
As a follow-up, I think, you were saying during presentation that you view methanolysis as a more efficient technology than others, other chemical recycling technologies such as pyrolysis perhaps. Is that what you're saying that your costs and greenhouse emissions would be much more advantaged versus, let's say, pyrolysis?
Yeah, I think that's an important question to understand because there's a lot of technologies running around on this topic, and it's easy to get confused, and people are still, both investors and customers are still trying to figure it out. They're not interchangeable technologies at all. They do different things, and I'll let Steve further explain that.
Okay, yeah. Just to first separate the technologies. Pyrolysis is predominantly focused on polyolefins, methanolysis on polyester, and those two polymer families usually don't compete in applications. A polyester is like a clear bottle or rigid tray you'd see in the grocery store, flexible packaging for polyolefins. The chemistry it takes to actually break them down to molecularly recycle them, also very different. Just, you know, think, you know, polyester molecular recycling relative to Eastman inside of the PET area. It's like the advantage that methanolysis has is that when you run the process, based on the nature of the polymer, it actually simply goes back to the monomers, DMT and EG. If you do pyrolysis, you basically fragment the polyolefin into several different polymer chain lengths.
Because we go back to DMT and EG, we actually replace all of the other unit ops that starts with basically extraction through all of the refining all the way to get to paraxylene intermediates up. Those 10 unit ops is a lot of energy, a lot of greenhouse gas, and it's a lot of emissions. The methanolysis process itself, it was on the slide, but I didn't cover it. It's actually on a polyester level, 93% or higher efficient all the way to the monomer. You can imagine from monomer to polymer is 99% efficient. Very efficient, very low greenhouse gas footprint, and it eliminates like 70%+ of the emissions in the process. Both from a greenhouse gas and from a total environmental perspective, very advantaged.
You know, I would also say that gasification is a similar kind of idea. The existing asset, right? We're not adding a new asset. We're leveraging an existing asset. Instead of using, you know, coal, we're gonna use waste plastic, right? Waste plastic has a much higher energy value, carbon value, so that's why it's 20%-50% more efficient than using dirt, right? You know, that's you know, a big advantage. You know, pyrolysis is a new unit you're adding in front of a cracker, right? It's got a very different sort of carbon footprint equation relative to what we're doing.
We're focused on the applications that we're in the polyester world, which is, you know, replacing like material, replacing styrene-based type polymers in a lot of specialty applications, but olefins just don't intersect with us at all. I think that's Mike back there. I can't see, but.
Hey, Mark. Mike Sison, Wells Fargo. So your first facility coming on in 2022, is that sold out within the terms of contracts that you like? You know, if more folks want materials sooner, could you accelerate to like a 2024, 2025 assuming they're all sold out as well?
Brad?
Yeah. Again, Mike, remember that this first facility is largely there to empower our or power up our specialty products, so the Tritan and the copolyesters. It's not a contracting strategy like I talked about or one that you're gonna fill out immediately. Very pleased we're using bridge volume right now because we have technology to bring some of this to market on a limited scale today. We've got-- we're well ahead of what we thought we'd be, and we're sold out on that. We'll ramp up quite quickly, but it won't sell out in year one. That's never been our goal. Like any good specialty business, those are gonna take time to go out and build up. We'll be, you know, multiyear kinda fill out rate on that particular plant.
As I said, there's, you know, 15% returns, very attractive returns.
And then just-
To just add, though, we can sell PET off of some of our lines in the short term. So it's a specialty value, which is the focus grows. We can fill out the asset on a total basis pretty quickly with PET and just titrate that off as specialty grows and switch it into the bigger plants that we're building.
Got it. As a quick follow-up, when you talk to your customers, when they put recycling or renew or whatever on the bottle or material, do those products sell better than the non-recycled, let's say, product? Then 'cause when I look on Amazon, I mean, the prices are higher, right? They're way higher. Do they sell better, I guess, is the question.
Yes. The very simple answer is yes. I think you see that in that phone case example. You see one brand owner adopting it or manufacturing adopting it. You see share gains, and those are at premium prices, and you saw that whole category switch. Pretty much every one of these brand owners has been working with our marketing teams to think about how to position, and part of that positioning is a premium. They believe they're bringing something much better to the market. Often it's embedded, as I showed some of those examples, if you think the BLACK+DECKER video, but even if you think our Herbal Essences from Procter & Gamble, often our product's embedded in an overall shift in the positioning of that product.
Both those are examples of companies trying to shift the positioning on the shelf around sustainability, and then the material is a component of that, and that's helping command that premium.
All right, next question. We'll go over there.
Josh Silverstein from Wolfe Research. As you guys are contemplating the second U.S. facility and the Europe facility, do you guys wanna go in this 100%? This is your own capital that you're putting up for this, and you were talking about potentially tapping the green bond market. Is this what it would go for?
Willie?
Yeah. If you think about the profile of the contracts and the business, and that level of returns, I believe our investor base wants us to invest in this and on the upside. As you think about the cash flow and also the time horizons, we think this is very manageable given the robust cash flows that we're gonna generate over the next several years, in addition to the financing being available.
Got it. As you're considering a second U.S. project, why not think about an expansion of Kingsport first? It seems like, given the facility that's already in place, maybe a brownfield expansion might be more economic.
Wanna take that, too?
Yeah, sure. Obviously, we have a lot of facilities around the world, and I think we've talked previously about how we utilize those. We have locations in Texas as well as Kingsport that could be part of that, but we will look at the optimal site.
There's also value in spreading out where you're trying to source feedstock, right? You're not trying to pull from, you know, I think Frank's question, too far of a geography, you know, in the scale of the facility you have. It's a really complicated equation as you look at it from, you know, access to feedstock, leveraging the infrastructure, of course, we have in Tennessee, which is very advantaged, you know, to doing this first plant. Access to green energy and how you're gonna tap into that, and all those factors go into that second and third plant, in those locations. We really like diversifying, you know, our manufacturing footprint from the U.S. into Europe with both specialties and the circular packaging and textiles.
You gotta weigh all those factors together and how you're trying to balance the returns and the sort of de-risking of these projects as you look at them. Jeff.
I'll take it.
Oh, two Jeffs.
Edlain Rodriguez from Jefferies. Mark, when you look at the current portfolio, like, how much of it would you say you classify as being high-value products, and how big can that proportion be in five years?
I'm sorry. You're saying of the total company earnings?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes. Sales or earnings.
Yeah. I would say right now, I would classify 70% as higher value from an earnings basis today, and that number can be 80% as you look at going forward under our current portfolio.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's really AM and AFP, right?
Yeah.
As we stabilize fibers and that textile grows, that push should be on the 80% and, you know, and there's always, you know, how we think about the portfolio in the long term.
Something related. In terms of, I mean, you've talked about the margin stability of the portfolio, the resiliency of it. Of course, at the same time, the valuation metrics compared to your specialty peers are much lower. Like, what do you think you have to do to converge those two metrics?
To improve the valuation or the metrics?
Yeah, to have the metrics converge. Like-
Yeah. Well, first of all, the slide that Willie put up, I think, you know, addresses a pretty good set of metrics around how we're performing. From a financial outcome point of view, you know, the strength and stability of our margins, the growth rates in AFP over time, the free cash flow conversion, the ROIC, I think are all extremely attractive and in line with specialties, if not, you know, frankly, slightly better than the specialty average. From a pure financial point of view, I think, you know, we are already delivering very compelling metrics. When you look at the forecast of what we're giving you going forward, those metrics get better. The cash gets better, the margins get better, the earnings growth gets better, the ROIC gets better. That seems good.
When you look at the credibility underneath of this is a proven innovation-driven growth model that is delivering a very compelling organic growth in the specialties. Then we add circularity onto this model that we have put forward, you know, to provide stable earnings, I think, you know, is extremely attractive organic growth with attractive returns. I think this portfolio is, you know, very much, you know, well down its path to specialty transformation. The integrated system of how we do it and leverage businesses like CI to fund the growth and provide advantaged cost positions that enable us to have scale and innovation and the circular economy is compelling. Our job is to create a very compelling story, which I think we've done.
Your job is to decide whether you believe in it or not, invest, and that's how valuations get created. I think, you know, we're extremely well-positioned to have a far better valuation, when we look at where we are, you know, today relative to the sort of financial returns we're offering. Jeff.
Thank you. Jeff Zekauskas from JPMorgan. You're putting a good amount of capital to work over the next several years in service of much higher returns than you've had in the past. You've also in the past generated $1 billion or $1.1 billion in free cash flow annually.
Yeah.
Are we going to go through a period where the free cash flow generation is more like $800 million or $900 million in service of the longer-term improvement in investment returns?
That's a great question.
That's the base case.
Great question, Jeff. To your point, free cash flow has been roughly 1-1.1. We've been allocating roughly $300 million-$400 million of that to debt. We've got the opportunity to invest in these high return projects. That would probably increase the CapEx no more than that, probably towards the lower end.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously, I think the $900 million-$1 billion would still be our objective as we're growing EBITDA across this time horizon as well. Yes, that's why you also saw us change our focus today to be operating cash flow as we make this transition with the strong and compelling growth case that I think we've presented.
Yeah, I mean, Jeff, just the way we think about it is the strategy around our core transformation, our specialty business that requires $500 million-$600 million of capital to support that growth, including $300 million of maintenance, is intact and stays the same. If you will, the free cash flow would still be, you know, north of $1.1 billion. We're looking at from an investing activity point of view, if you will, our choices, big circular plants, M&A, share repurchases.
Mm-hmm.
You know, as competing for that cash to some degree. That's sort of why we switched to OCF and wanted to sort of make sure we're clear about that, because that's a shift-
Yes.
...you know, in what we're doing. We think it's really attractive. When you look at the multiples out in the marketplace today for M&A, you know, these circular plants offer a far better, you know, return, and it's leveraging core Eastman's world-class technology has been around for 70 years.
Sure.
You know, we think, you know, has a unique opportunity right now with what's going on in the sort of sustainability elements of how we're making a better planet.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you very much.
Yeah.
Actually, I already got you, John, so I'm gonna let other people get in. Go ahead.
Thanks. Yeah, it's Matthew DeYoe from Bank of America. The prospects of this Airgas business model for methanolysis are attractive, undoubtedly. It's not particularly new technology, methanolysis in itself. How do you expect competition to evolve here, as this becomes a more viable business model or as you prove it out?
Yeah.
... I s the first mover advantage the primary moat, or are there other kind of areas where you should be able to differentiate yourself over time?
Yeah. That's why we created that triangle chart, because there are multiple dimensions, layers, if you will, of how we're creating advantage in this, that I think are quite significant. We spent a lot of time trying to make sure we're building a defensible long-term platform. I'll let Steve start by, you know, answering some of the more sort of operational technical side of this.
Yeah. I'll go back to the, you know. I mean, there's a lot of people in the molecular recycling space, so separate out the polyolefins and just think about polyester. I mean, today, I would say Eastman's the only company at scale that is investing this heavily into the polyester recycling space. The 30 years is an advantage, but the most significant advantage is the fact that we're not going to disrupt mechanical recycling, so we're going after the harder to recycle waste. That means the feedstocks will be variable. It means the impurity profile is gonna be variable. Our experience over the 30 years focused on that, but the experience that we're gaining today with the pilot facility. Brad told you how much material that we already knew that we were gonna bring in.
All that went through lab scale, bin scale, pilot scale, all the qualification. We're learning really, really rapidly around that depolymerization purification step, right? We're gonna protect that as long as we can, and it'll give us a substantial head start where it'll be hard to close the gap.
That's not the only advantage, right? There's also a lot of what we bring on the commercial side, the AD, the polymer connections we have in the market. You might wanna hit on that, Brad.
Yeah, I think, you know, the example that I showed or all those examples, you know, the startup companies just don't have that capability. It's both the reliable performance we've had many years plus that application development to really fuel that growth. I think, you know, we're in a very different spot. Probably the best indicator is it's never easy to get these kind of customers to sign up for long-term contracts. When I say things like cost plus and take or pay, the only way you're gonna get those kind of contracts in this market is if you have something completely different and you're solving a major unmet need, and that's where we're at. Long term, we do need more development because I showed you there's 9 billion kg of polyester out there.
We've got to solve the world's problem, and Eastman won't do that alone. We're not afraid of competition. We're just confident we'll be well ahead of them, not only in terms of first mover, but in terms of the cost position we have.
There's IP we're getting along the way. We'll see how valuable it is, but, you know, we're relying on that as the advantage. It's all the history, experience, and frankly, scalability we have that our competitors at this stage just don't have at all.
Okay. I guess just on all this, and I know it might be early, but do you envision project one to, you know, U.S. and Europe being servicing individual customers, or will that be packaged across many customers, operating the same business model?
Yeah. The first plan, like Brad said, will be specialty serving a lot of different customers. You know, you've seen a lot of the brands sign up, you know, on that sort of critical icon chart. The circular packaging and textile part of the next plans will probably be larger contracts with fewer set of customers, you know, that are really driving those projects. Then you'll leave some, you know, for the market. It will, it'll be a little bit different. How about Angel over there in the back?
Hi, Angel Castillo on for Morgan Stanley and Vincent Andrews. So just wanted to follow up on the new plans. I think it was $600 million-$800 million of CapEx. I was wondering, could you break that down across the three facilities I think they were shown on the slide? Will you be building mixed plastic processing? I just want to clarify that.
Yes, we're not gonna break it down, but, you know, if you think about the methanolysis plant we're currently building that's $250 million, you know, it's not a PET line, but a polymer line. You can see that there's a balance there in the CapEx between those two steps, as you look at that larger scale. The reason the CapEx is higher is we don't have all the infrastructure to leverage in Kingsport when we build these new plants, in these other locations that are gonna be more, you know, greenfield slash, you know, limited brownfield, if you will, in the locations we're looking at. The mixed plastic processing is a much more affordable unit in that total capital expenditure, but it is a proprietary technology we have to very efficiently separate polyester from other mixed waste plastic. It is a very significant competitive advantage.
We're already gonna have it in place in Kingsport that will then split the polyester to methanolysis and split all the other waste plastic to the CRT, you know, into the gasifier. There are ways that make a lot of sense with other partners in other locations where we can do that in these other two plants to keep the polyester for ourselves and get that other stream to companies who put a high value on it in these other circular technologies being developed. There's a natural opportunity of competitive advantage in MPP as well that we can bring to both Europe and the U.S. But you know, that gives you a sort of directional idea.
That's helpful. Thanks. Just a quick follow-up to that, do you foresee yourself licensing that in the future? A secondary question, just I think you mentioned that as you fill up the specialty side of the business in terms of new contracts, you might be selling to maybe PET. Is that something you would do through selling DMT and EG, or do you see yourself actually making PET, and would you do that through partnerships or?
Yeah. We're not looking at selling intermediates, and we're not at this point looking at licensing technology for the recycling technology. The MPP is. There's opportunities to partner with the waste stream, and we are looking at sort of licensing and collaboration ideas on that for sourcing feedstock. To be clear, all these plants are both methanolysis and polymer, right? In Tennessee, it's specialty polymer like Tritan. We have some existing PET assets we can leverage already to fill out the plants and manage pure run rate on that methanolysis plant.
These new plants, you know, are, you know, again, methanolysis and polymer, but this time it'll be, you know, PET or, you know, or polyester for textiles and some amount of specialty, especially for the Europe plant, will be more of hybrid, you know, kind of design. The U.S. plant probably more focused on, you know, packaging and textiles. Other questions? John. We're hitting round two, so we're getting-
John Roberts from UBS. Is CO2 sequestration in the future for Kingsport? If so, how would you do that? I don't know if there's any place to put the CO2.
You can answer that question.
Yeah, I mentioned in the comments around climate, you know, we are looking at the emerging technologies, and we call it carbon recovery because we actually think the preferred outlet is carbon recovery and use. We do have some programs looking at how we can actually recycle CO2 back into products, but they're pretty early on at this stage. It will definitely be part of that strategy that carries us from now to, you know, beyond 2030.
I'm gonna take just one last question, and then we're gonna wrap it up.
Hi, [audio distortion] at Evercore ISI. You've touched on the competitive balance and environment and mechanical recycling, but what are you seeing in terms of capital deployment for your peers and how they're devoting capital into this market and how that's impacted contracting going forward?
For the circular economy?
Yes.
Right now, this is why we feel sort of confident about moving forward is we don't really have that much competition, right, from an at-scale kind of competitor. We're pretty much the only game in town in polyester. There are startups out there, and they're obviously engaging brands, and I think the brands are looking at how they, you know, position themselves to support multiple technologies 'cause the need that they have is so excessive in where they are to where they need to get on recycled content. They wanna play multiple bets. There are companies out there, but they're more in the startup category.
As we look at the overall opportunity, you know, we just don't see a lot of significant capital deployment in polyester here in the short term, and that's sort of why we're pushing ahead so aggressively. I think over time, we expect other companies to, you know, get in this game. It's obviously just a huge market opportunity that needs to be solved. You know, that's why we have the circular contracting model in mind of making sure we have secure contracts that give us margin stability or we won't build the plant.
Okay. Thank you. One last follow-up. In terms of your Fibers business, are you continuing to invest in that, or is it still or possibly under strategic review? Just trying to understand the drivers there on a go-forward basis.
Yeah. Fibers is a great business in generating a lot of cash flow that supported our growth over the last decade. Obviously, it's come off from its highs. What's great about where we are right now is the textile business is growing faster than the tow business decline. The margins are pretty similar, so we're not actually making a margin trade-off anymore between those two businesses. The integration of our Tennessee site is extensive and complex. We've talked about this multiple times in our past.
You know, the way this whole biopolymer chain is integrated into our growth of existing earnings in AM and AFP today, along with Fibers, and then you throw in the circular economy about how we can accelerate such an extensive growth, like in food service that Frank mentioned or the micro beads, you know, that Solution businesses is looking at than just the traditional nylon textile market that's already growing fast. You know, you can't unwind all that. It's all too integrated. So when you put it together on a net basis, that integrated stream has incredibly high margins and has very attractive net growth, on a corporate basis. It just gets divided up and now it shows up across the portfolio.
You know, we're very focused on leveraging that integration and advantage we have because, you know, we're the only game in town that starts with a solid feedstock that can use plastic waste to put recycled content in polymer, in cellulosic polymers. Every competitor we have is based on natural gas. They can't do that. We have a huge competitive advantage, you know, in the biopolymer side with our asset configuration that literally no one else has. In addition to all these different polymers we can make, you know, with our olefin additives and modifications to the performance that our competitors also don't have. It's a great integrated stream. I mean, it's a lot of opportunity there too. It's not just about polyester. All right.
With that, I'm gonna wrap up the formal Q&A. The Q&A will continue, I hope, as you stick around and have lunch with us. Feel free to reach out and talk to all the team members for that. Thank you so much for coming here today. We do think it's a great opportunity to invest in Eastman. We hope we answered some of your questions, and we view this as just the beginning of our story. We look forward to a lot of the one-on-one conversations with all of you to sort of further answer your questions and help you understand our value proposition. Thank you. Have a good day.