Over 400 million tons of plastic are produced every year, but less than 10 percent are recycled, with the majority entering incineration centers or landfills around the world. Addressing this pressing crisis, deep tech company DePoly announced a seed funding round to scale the solution that the global consumer packaging and textile world has been longing for decades: a universal chemical recycling process converting plastics into raw materials without affecting their quality.
The oversubscribed funding round was co-led by BASF Venture Capital and Wingman Ventures, with the participation of Beiersdorf, Infinity Recycling, CIECH Ventures, Zürcher Kantonalbank, Angel Invest, ACE & Company, and others.
Plastics like polyethylene terephthalate (PET) can be found in many of our daily items, such as clothing, packaging, and outdoor equipment. Unfortunately, the high costs and difficulty required for sorting, separating, and cleaning these complex plastic streams, coupled with a lack of globally scaled solutions mean that only so-called perfect (clean, simple composition without other materials mixed) plastics get recycled. DePoly aims to tackle the entire waste plastic problem with its chemical recycling technology. Currently, it converts all PET plastics and polyester textiles – originally sourced from fossil fuels – back into their main raw chemical components. Those components are then sold back to the industry to make new virgin-quality plastic items, creating a truly sustainable circular plastic economy.
The globally unique chemical recycling technology developed by DePoly operates at room temperature and standard pressure and does not require any pre-washing, pre-sorting, pre-melting, or separating out other plastics or materials, unlike most of the technologies out there. Ultimately, it can uniquely deal with PET and polyester streams typically turned down by the conventional recycling system, such as those containing mixed plastics, mixed colors, dirty plastic waste streams, as well as fabrics and fibers. The technology is energy efficient, can be implemented quickly, and is easy to tailor to a customer’s specific needs.
DePoly has built and operates a pilot plant that processes a capacity of 50 tonnes per year of these complex PET or polyester plastic streams, showcasing the scope and flexibility of how the technology works for various industries ranging from post-consumer packaging to textiles, fashion, and post-industrial streams. Currently, the company is working on building a new showcase plant with a capacity of 500 tonnes per year to demonstrate the technology at a commercial scale.
DePoly was launched in 2020, in Sion, by three co-founders – Samantha Anderson, Bardiya Valizadeh, and Christopher Ireland. Driven by their collective expertise supported by PhDs diplomas in chemistry and engineering, they developed this unique chemical recycling process to address the pressing issue of plastic pollution, launching their pilot plant for PET plastics the same year. Today, the team counts 13 people with substantial industry experience, ready to scale DePoly’s technology and make the company a leader of a global plastic recycling revolution by pushing the boundaries of innovation– establishing new plants around the world while expanding the portfolio of plastics.