Swiss scale-up DePoly’s chemical recycling technology converts plastics and polyester textiles – including unsorted dirty PET waste – into virgin-grade raw materials, which are then sold back to the industry to make new items. Its customers include major companies in the chemical, textile and plastic packaging industries.
The company, a 2024 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and the winner of the 2024 Top 100 Swiss Startup Award, is active in Europe, the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Japan and Korea. It plans to open a 500 ton a year showcase plant in Monthey, Switzerland this summer and is actively seeking corporate partners to test its technology and conclude offtake agreements.
“We are building a future where waste becomes a resource and plastic becomes truly circular,” says co-founder and CEO Sam Anderson. “Our goal is to tackle all the plastics and have an end-of-life solution for all plastic streams no matter how hard or easy it is to recycle them.”
Anderson is a speaker on a panel about promising technological solutions to tackle pollution at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China on June 25 which will be moderated by The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief.
About 400 million tons of plastic are produced each year, but less than 10% is recycled, with most of the rest ending up incinerated or in landfills. One reason is that it is difficult for conventional recycling processes to handle contaminated plastics, like those that are made up of several different types of plastics, combined with other materials or those that are dirty.
DePoly was founded in 2020 by CEO Anderson, CTO Bardiya Valizadeh and CSO Christopher Ireland. The idea for the company was formed after the three moved to Switzerland to work on their PhDs. They became concerned about the impact of plastic pollution after reading academic papers on the subject and set out to find a chemistry-based solution to the problem, Anderson says.
In conventional plastic recycling items like bottles and food packaging made of PET and other plastics are mechanically sorted into colors, cleaned, melted and turned into PET pellets. But if they are too dirty, mixed with other plastics or in fabric or fiber form, they usually get incinerated or dumped into a landfill.
DePoly’s circular solution recycles what was previously not usable and avoids the need for new plastic to be made from crude oil. “Our technology is based on a simple chemical reaction. We use pure chemistry to break down plastic at its weakest point and separate the polymer from the main monomers to produce a PET feedstock that creates virgin quality plastics,” says Anderson.
DePoly collects plastics for its feedstock from mechanical recyclers who hand over what they can’t use, acoustic paneling insulation from construction companies, and worn and dirty textiles that would otherwise end up as scrap. “Our process is really robust,” she says. “It can tolerate a lot of impurities in the feedstock.”
DePoly’s technology has already demonstrated its commercial impact through collaborations with companies such as Odlo in fashion, but also in cosmetics and the broader consumer goods industry and innovators such as PTI Technologies which specializes in plastic sustainable packaging design and development, says Anderson. Through these partnerships she says the Swiss scale-up has validated the quality of its recycled monomers by transforming PET waste into new bottles, high-performance textile fibers, and cosmetic packaging that meet, and even exceed, the highest standards of purity and performance across a wide range of industries.
Other young companies that are trying to tackle plastic and textile waste include France’s Carbios, which uses enzymes to render plastic waste compostable, Syre, a U.S. based company that has developed a textile-to-textile recycling solution that aims to provide circular polyester with quality on par with virgin polyester and Reju, a Dutch textile-to-textile regeneration company.
Anderson says DePoly’s differentiator is that it can process not only textiles but many different types of plastics from waste streams that are not sorted, washed or preprocessed; its approach uses commonly available and safe household chemicals; and its patented reaction happens at low heat without additional pressure. These factors make DePoly’s process more economical, says Anderson. “The chemicals we use are easily sourced and the infrastructure we are using is off-the-shelf chemistry industry equipment, so our capex is low, which helps with our goal of achieving price parity” with oil-based virgin plastic,” she says.
Achieving price parity and making the leap to industrial-scale implementation will require more collaboration and commitments from large companies, says Anderson.
DePoly is planning to build a commercial plant in 2027 that will process significantly larger volumes of PET and polyester waste. To accelerate this expansion, DePoly announced in late April that it raised a total of $23 million in seed funding, with MassMutual Ventures joining a second closing of its round. The expanded investor base positions DePoly as one of the biggest recycling technology companies in Europe, with more than $30 million raised across two rounds and grants. MassMutual Ventures joins existing investors BASF Venture Capital, Founderful, ACE & Company, Angel Invest, Zürcher Kantonalbank, Beiersdorf Venture Capital, and Syensqo.
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