About 400 million tons of plastic are produced every year, but less than 10% is recycled, and most of the rest end up in incinerators or landfills. One reason is that it is difficult for conventional recycling processes to handle contaminated plastics, such as plastics that are composed of different types of plastics, combined with other materials, or simply dirty. DePoly, a deep-tech startup, has developed a process that is able to tackle complex plastic flows and convert plastics back into raw materials without compromising quality. The Swiss-based startup announced today that it has raised $13.8 million in seed funding.
The round was co-led by BASF Venture Capital and Wingman Ventures, with participation from other investors such as Beiersdorf, Infinity Recycling, CIECH Ventures and Angel Invest.
DePoly’s chemical recycling technology converts all PET plastics and polyester fabrics back into their main chemical raw materials, which are then sold back to industry to make new items. DePoly says items made from its raw material are virgin quality.
The company currently operates a pilot plant that can process 50 tons of complex PET or polyester plastic streams per year. It serves industries including post-consumer packaging, textiles, fashion and post-industrial flows. DePoly is building a 500-ton capacity showcase factory to demonstrate its technology on a commercial scale and already has five customers ranging from fast fashion brands, sports brands and packaging users to resin producers.
Founded in 2020 by CEO Samantha Anderson, CTO Bardiya Valizadeh and CSO Christopher Ireland, DePoly now has a team of 13 people. In the years before the launch of DePoly, the three moved to Switzerland to work on their PhDs and postdocs. Anderson told JS that many articles were being published on issues such as microplastics in humans, growing plastic patches in the ocean, and animals washing ashore with microplastics in their stomachs.
“To us, this was all pretty alarming, especially since companies didn’t seem to care about fixing the problem now, not 10 to 15 years from now,” Anderson said. “So we decided we wanted to tackle the plastic problem, using chemistry and the skills we developed in college, with the goal, if we could make it work, of getting a company out of business and solving the problem faster. tackle than others. .”
Conventional plastic recycling means that things like bottles and food packaging made from PET and other plastics are taken to a recycling facility, then sorted by color, cleaned, melted down and turned into rPET pellets. But if they’re too dirty, mixed with other plastics or in dust or fiber form, they’re usually incinerated or dumped in a landfill, Anderson said. There are also limits to what can be recycled due to health and food safety standards, meaning most of the plastic produced is destroyed or thrown away, and new plastic must be made from crude oil.
DePloy’s chemical recycling technology operates at room temperature and standard pressure, and does not require plastics and materials to be washed, pre-sorted, pre-melted or separated. This means it can be used to recycle PET and polyester that do not enter conventional recycling systems, including mixed plastics, mixed colours, dirty plastic waste streams, fabrics and fibres. PET is converted back into PTA and MEG, the original two monomers.
Anderson explained that DePoly has a B2B model that connects users of complex plastic waste, such as blended polyesters, multi-layered PET items, or PET items that are too dirty or chemically contaminated to be introduced into the mechanical recycling process, with people who Producing new quality PET articles. of oil due to limited accessibility to sustainable chemicals such as PTA and MEG. DePoly’s technology allows one side to get rid of PET and other plastic waste, and the other side (or the producers) to access the original, sustainable chemicals that make up these items, creating a circular economy for plastics are created.
DePoly can also perform content recovery. For example, it can recover PP or cotton from combinations of PP/PET or blends of cotton and polyester. Anderson said this is because of the system’s low temperature, as it doesn’t melt polymers. The startup is also scaling up technology for polyurethanes (PU), polylactic acid (PLA) and similar polymers such as PBT.
As an example of how DePoly’s chemical recycling process has been used, Anderson said it worked with customers in the sporting goods industry who have polyurethane blended polyester items. The polyurethane content means those items would normally be thrown away, but DePoly can fully recycle them and is now scaling up its technology to recover the polyurethane portion.
Anderson cites startups Carbios, Gr3n, and Ioniqua as other startups doing similar work with plastics, saying she thinks “the technology they’ve developed is really great.” The main way DePoly differentiates itself is the reaction that takes place during the recycling process, the product output in the case of Ioniqua, the temperature required for the reaction, and the allowable contamination threshold. “In our case, we have a lower temperature, we produce the same monomers that make up PET, and we think we have a higher impurity threshold than others.”
In a statement on the investment, Antonia Albert, director of Wingman Ventures, said: “We are extremely proud to support DePoly from day one on their journey to address this planetary crisis to clean our oceans and landfills of plastic waste and to welcome leading investors from the chemical industry. , recycling, climate and deep tech space on board to build the global leader in sustainable plastics recycling.”