MacroCycle Technologies funding news – MacroCycle Technologies Secures $6.5Million in Seed Funding

The round was led by Clean Energy Ventures and Volta Circle, with participation from KDT Ventures and Neotribe Ventures. MacroCycle will use the funding to grow its operations by 50% and scale its pilot plant facilities to develop its upcycled PET & polyester resin with initial customers.

Plastic production and disposal constitute more than 5% of global CO2 emissions. Today, only 15% of the plastics are recycled, while the remainder is disposed of in landfills and waterways or is incinerated.

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While the industry has attempted to break this cycle, waste contamination and energy intensity remain two major barriers to efficient plastics recycling.

Filtering through heterogeneous, contaminated recyclable materials and breaking down components into reusable end products has been too cost-intensive to be commercially adopted as a replacement for fossil fuel-derived plastics.

Clean Energy Ventures Managing Partner Temple Fennell said, “Global plastic waste is expected to triple in the next 40 years, and current mechanical and chemical recycling methods are not able to deliver viable solutions to process plastics and textiles waste streams, MacroCycle’s solution to upcycle plastics tackles an increasingly severe waste issue to create an economically and environmentally circular plastics supply chain.”

Catia Cesari, Managing Partner of Volta Circle, an investment firm backed by the founders of Indorama Ventures, the global leader in PET production and recycling said, “MacroCycle’s superior unit economics, energy efficiency, and ability to upcycle low-grade feedstocks gives them a critical competitive advantage in a sector that calls for innovation. The team, its technology and its ambition perfectly encapsulate our mission to back the best founders leading the way in the circular economy and we’re delighted to be supporting MacroCycle as it scales and creates genuine global impact,”.

Modern approaches to recycling break down plastic waste into the molecular building blocks of plastic (monomers) or back to fossil fuels. These processes require a significant amount of energy, which limits their competitiveness with fossil fuel-derived plastic production.

Without breaking down the plastic, MacroCycle’s breakthrough technology upgrades plastic waste into its previous high-quality “virgin-grade” form.

Their innovative chemistry and selective non-toxic reagents afford a simpler process that requires 80% less energy than fossil-based PET production and 50-75% lower capital expenditure than competing chemical or biologic recycling methods.

MacroCycle CEO Stwart Peña Feliz said, “There is a $700 billion linear plastics market opportunity, but today’s advanced recycling technologies are too expensive to build and operate, and still yield low-value products. MacroCycle’s technology provides a more efficient process to produce high-quality plastic that can be adopted as a drop-in solution competitive with fossil fuel-based plastic, Our technology will be a key enabler for plastic circularity, as we allow our customers and suppliers to unlock the economic benefits of recycling.”

Macrocycle is expected to recycle PET bottles and polyester textile waste from customers in the cosmetics, textiles, home goods, food and beverage industries with large packaging waste footprints as well as luxury and fast fashion clothing brands.

To address demand for its PET product, MacroCycle’s first pilot plant will support large-scale product validation and produce the first bottles and garments made entirely from MacroCycle’s recycled PET resin.

About MacroCycle

MacroCycle, they revive end-of-life plastics. They will protect their world through their circular, sustainable, zero-carbon plastic upcycling process.

With leading experts in polymer chemistry and plastics engineering from MIT, ETH Zurich and Politecnico di Milano on their team, they take plastic waste in the form of bottles, food trays and polyester textiles, and produce their first product, virgin-grade mPET (MacroCycle-PET) resin.