Plastic recycling is not progressing well enough. Only about 9% of plastic is recycled worldwide, which seems pretty terrible until you compare it to textiles. Only 0.5% of that is recycled.
One of the biggest challenges is that textiles are rarely a single material. Buttons and zippers complicate matters, but spandex is even trickier. A novel synthetic blend creates garments that are a dream to wear but a nightmare to recycle.
“The challenge with recycling is that you can never predict waste,” Swart Peña Feliz, co-founder and CEO of MacroCycle, told TechCrunch. “Waste contains a myriad of pollutants.”
MacroCycle has developed a shortcut of sorts that promises to make recycled plastic as cheap as virgin material. The startup has devised a way to extract desirable synthetic fibers from waste textiles, leaving everything else behind. MacroCycle is a Top 20 finalist in Startup Battlefield and is presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.
Peña Feliz is no stranger to the pitfalls of recycling plastic. Early in his career, he helped run ExxonMobil’s chemical recycling plant, which uses heat to break down plastics into simpler hydrocarbons. It works, but the process is energy-intensive and emits large amounts of carbon dioxide.
“I saw it firsthand and knew I had to do something,” he said.
Shortly after leaving Exxon, Peña Feliz decided to pursue an MBA at MIT. There he met Jan-Georg Rosenboom, who as a postdoctoral fellow developed a new way to recycle plastic. “When I saw his technology, I thought it was too good to be true,” Peña Feliz said.
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The two began turning the technology into a business in the fall of 2022. The following spring, they were selected for a Breakthrough Energy Fellowship to develop it further. “We looked at each other and said, ‘I guess we’re doing this full time,'” Peña Feliz said. MacroCycle raised a $6.5 million seed round earlier this year.
To understand plastic recycling, it helps to know a little about the chemistry of the material. Plastics are polymers, long chains of monomers, or repeating chemical building blocks. Most chemical recycling processes break down plastic polymers into smaller components, such as monomers, and reassemble them into something indistinguishable from virgin plastic.
MacroCycle is different in that it does not degrade the polymer. Instead, the polymer chains are looped back into place and forced into a ring called a macrocycle. These macrocycles remain when contaminants are washed away by various solvents and can themselves be recycled. The ring is then reopened to reform the polymer chain. “When the rings open, they try to bond to each other. With polyester, the longer the polymer, the higher the quality,” Peña-Feliz said.
“By not having to go through all these steps again, we can adopt a significantly more energy-efficient approach,” he added. Macrocycle’s process uses 80% less energy than it takes to make virgin polyester, he said, and other chemical recycling processes use 20 to 30% less energy.
Peña-Feliz said the startup is in the process of installing a larger reactor, 2,000 times larger than the reactor it used two and a half years ago. This is large enough to produce 100 kilogram (220 pound) batches of material that customers can use as samples. He said Macrocycle makes money from fashion brands with an interest in technology.
“We are pleased to be one of the few, if not the only, public chemical recyclers that can claim to be able to offer this material at a comparable price once we build our first industrial facility,” Feliz Peña said.
He believes this is the only way recycled plastics can replace fossil fuels in the industry. “Revenue drives a lot of innovation, and even if you want companies like ExxonMobil to change the way they do things, it doesn’t come from within,” he said. “I want to be able to develop economically attractive technologies where the opportunity cost of not adopting this new type of solution is very high.”
If you want to hear directly from MacroCycle, see more pitches, attend valuable workshops, and make connections that drive business results, go here to learn more about this year’s Disrupt, taking place in San Francisco from October 27-29.
