The world聽recycles just 14% of the plastic packaging it uses. Even worse:聽8m tons of plastic, much of it packaging, ends up in the oceans each year, where sea life and birds die from eating it or getting entangled in it. Some of the plastics will also bind with industrial chemicals that have polluted oceans for decades, raising concerns that聽toxins can make their way into our food chain.
Recycling the remaining 86% of used plastics could create $80bn-$120bn in revenues, says a聽recent report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. But those revenues will never be fully achieved without designing new ways to breakdown and reuse 30% (by weight) of the plastic packaging that isn鈥檛 recycled because the material is contaminated or too small for easy collection, has very low economic value or contains multiple materials that cannot be easily separated. Think of candy wrappers, take-out containers, single-serving coffee capsules and foil-lined boxes for soup and soymilk.
Large companies such as Coca-Cola have developed聽plant-based alternatives to conventional, petroleum-based plastic so that they can break down easily without contaminating the soil and water. The market opportunity has also attracted small, young companies that focus on developing recycling technology to tackle that troublesome 30% of plastic packaging that is headed to landfills at best, and, at worst, to our rivers, lakes and oceans.
Agylix
The target:聽Polystyrene. It鈥檚 commonly made into products such as styrofoam cups, packing peanuts and rigid red picnic cups.
Trouble spot:聽Used polystyrene foam packaging has long been condensed and 鈥渄owncycled鈥� into d茅cors such as crown molding or picture frames. Fully recycling used polystyrene back into the same material could reduce demand for oil and cut greenhouse gases even more.
The fix:聽Founded in 2006, Agylix鈥檚 technology breaks the polymer down to molecules, which it sells in liquid form to refiners that will bind the molecules to form polystyrene, according to CEO Ross Patten. Agylix鈥檚 technology can go further and convert polystyrene back to crude oil. It did that until last year, when low oil prices made it unfeasible to continue.
The challenge:聽Agylix, based outside Portland, Oregon, may find itself with a decreasing feedstock. There are legislative and grassroots campaigns in the US aimed at eliminating polystyrene packaging. Not only is it prevalent in oceans, but some public health advocates say itcould cause cancer. Maryland is considering a ban on polystyrene foam packaging, and shareholder groups are pressuring Walmart, Target and Amazon to stop using the material for shipping.
BioCellection
The target:聽Low-density polyethylene (LDPE). It鈥檚 everywhere: grocery bags, produce bags and Ziploc bags. It鈥檚 also not accepted in curbside recycling programs. Some grocery stores do collect and send it to companies that turn it into plastic lumber and other products.
Trouble spot:聽Consumers tend to put LDPE in their recycling bins anyway, even though recyclers don鈥檛 want it. The material has become the bane of many recycling facility managers because they have no market into which to sell it, and in turn have not instituted systems for sorting and collecting the film. As a result, it tends to gunk up sorting and conveyance machinery.
The fix:聽Jeanny Yao and Miranda Wang, the entrepreneurs behind a two-year-old San Jose, California startup called BioCellection, are using genetic engineering to create a process that turns LDPE into chemical compounds for use in a variety of ways, including emulsifiers or cleansers in cosmetics to textile manufacturing. Their process involves feeding the plastic to a machine roughly the size of a cargo container and using a chemical treatment to break down the LDPE into small carbon-based molecules into powder form.
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