The first eco-friendly technology for greasy mixed plastics recycling
Owing to their combination of unrivaled properties and low cost, plastics are the workhorse material of the modern economy. While delivering many benefits, the current plastics economy has drawbacks that are becoming more apparent by the day. The primary problem is the high material waste rate and poor closed-loop recycling in plastics manufacturing. Today, just 14% of plastics are used for recycling. To cope this problem, the European Commission has tried to implement increasingly stringent regulations, such as reducing landfilling or incineration, by increasing the taxes for waste disposal and promoting recycling. Nevertheless, the current inefficient recycling technologies make plastics recycled uncompetitive as raw material for many plastics converters. At TUSTI. BV. (Eindhoven, Netherlands) we have developed a smart solution to overcome these barriers. EGREMPLARE high-tech recycling process is a novel process that makes recycling of mixed plastics possible, allowing to increase to 60-85% the collected plastics to be recycled. We use our proprietary cleaning process that uses a bio-based material without not generation of new waste streams and with a low energy consumption. Companies have to pay less than landfilling taxes, contributing to the achievement of objectives set by the European Commission and reducing disposal cost. Since our foundation in 2015, we have invested over 350,000 euros to develop pilots tests, the bio-based cleaner, and process improvements. Now, based on the good results of our system, we aim to speed-up the technology to introduce our solution in the plastic recycled market. This market with such growth potential (predicted to increase at 6% CAGR up to 2022 reaching €42B), could greatly benefit from our eco-friendly and low-energy solution. We aim to achieve sales of 12,000 tonnes of plastic waste collected and over 10,000 of plastics recycled in the third year of commercialization, with revenues of more than 6 M€ by 2023.