DePoly keeps hard-to-recycle plastic from ending up in landfills
Summary
The Swiss-based startup announced today 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 like Beiersdorf, Infinity Recycling, CIECH Ventures and Angel Invest.DePolys chemical recycling tech converts all PET plastics and polyester textiles back into their main raw chemical components, which are then sold back to the 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 per year of complex PET or polyester plastic streams. DePoly is building a showcase plant with a capacity of 500 tons to demonstrate its tech at commercial scale, and it already has five customers, ranging from fast-fashion brands, to sporting good brands and packaging users to resin producers.DePoly was founded in 2020 by CEO Samantha Anderson, CTO Bardiya Valizadeh and CSO Christopher Ireland, and now has a team of 13 people. The polyurethane content means those items would usually be discarded, but DePoly is able to fully recycle them and is now scaling its tech to recover the polyurethane portion.Anderson cites startups Carbios, Gr3n and Ioniqa as other companies that are doing similar work with plastics, and says she thinks the tech theyve developed is really neat. In our case, were lower temperature, produce the same monomers that make up PET and to our understanding have a higher contamination threshold versus others.In a statement about the investment, Wingman Ventures principal Antonia Albert said, We are extremely proud to support DePoly since day one on their journey to tackle this planetary crisis to clean our oceans and landfills from plastic waste and to welcome leading investors from the chemicals, recycling, climate- and deep tech space on board to build the global leader for the sustainable plastics recycling.