DePoly, a Swiss low-carbon technology company, was founded in 2020. Its unique chemical recycling technology can convert composite plastic waste or contaminated plastic waste back into high-quality raw materials and use it to manufacture new plastic products, thereby achieving true sustainability. cycle.
DePoly is led by CEO Samantha Anderson, CTO Bardiya Valizadeh and COO Christopher Co-founded by Ireland and headquartered in Switzerland.
DePoly founding team
Approximately 400 million tons of plastic are produced globally every year, but less than 10% is recycled, and most of the rest is incinerated or landfilled. Landfilled plastics take 20 to 500 years to decompose, and burning plastic waste essentially cannot solve the recycling problem and will also produce pollutants such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur oxides.
Plastic recycling is one of the important ways to solve the problem of plastic waste, but the traditional recycling process has very limited effect.
Traditional plastic recycling involves color sorting, cleaning, melting and other processing of waste materials such as plastic bottles and food packaging made of PET and other materials, turning them into PET pellets. This recycling process is very expensive and only works for “perfect” (i.e. clean, single-component) plastic waste, which accounts for only about 9% of the total plastic volume. Most of the rest, that is, plastic waste that is stained or contains other components, fabrics or fiber materials, usually ends up in incineration or landfill, causing a serious burden on the environment.
Dr. Samantha Anderson, one of the founders of DePoly, conducts technical research
The disruptive technology developed by DePoly provides a universal solution for recycling these "imperfect" plastics.
Today, the plastics market still maintains a compound annual growth rate of 5%. What follows is a huge market demand for advanced recycling technology. DePoly is one of a handful of companies in the world focused on "depolymerization," a chemical process that breaks plastic down into its original materials.
The enhanced depolymerization recycling process developed by DePoly can decompose plastics that are difficult to recycle with traditional processes and re-decompose them into chemical raw materials necessary for the production of new plastic products, enabling the reuse and manufacturing of plastics. DePoly's chemical recycling process can break down plastic polymers such as PET into their original two material monomers, PTA and MEG. This technology does not require pre-washing, pre-sorting, pre-melting or separation of other materials, and can be performed at normal temperatures and pressures. This means that DePoly can not only process PET and polyester compounds that cannot be recycled by traditional processes, including mixed plastics, contaminated plastics, fabrics and mixed fibers, but its process consumes very little energy. Moreover, the quality of the chemical raw materials recovered through DePoly depolymerization technology is exactly the same as that of the raw materials extracted directly from petroleum. Plastic manufacturers no longer need to extract these two raw materials from petroleum, thus reducing the industry's dependence on petroleum.
In addition to obtaining the chemical raw materials for plastic production, DePoly's recycling process is also able to recover PP or cotton from PP/PET blends or cotton/polyester blends because the low-temperature nature of the process makes the recycling process more efficient and does not melt polymerization. things. DePoly is also continuously improving the recycling of polyurethane (PU), polylactic acid (PLA) and similar polymers such as PBT) technical level.
In terms of business model, DePoly recycles PET and other plastic waste on the one hand, and on the other hand provides depolymerized and recycled sustainable chemical raw materials to downstream manufacturers. Since 2020 Since its founding in 2007, DePoly has maintained close exchanges with companies in the packaging, food and recycling industries. Currently, DePoly has built and operates a pilot plant with a capacity to process 50 tons of PET or polyester plastic waste per year.
In June this year, DePoly announced that it had received 12.3 million Swiss francs in seed round financing. This round of financing will accelerate the large-scale application of DePoly technology and build a new demonstration factory with an annual production capacity of 500 tons. The factory is expected to be put into operation in 2024. In the future, DePoly hopes to redefine the global plastic life cycle by building a recycling network to recycle PET and all other types of plastic waste, ultimately creating a truly circular plastics economy around the world.
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