Backed by U.S. and European investors, MacroCycle is enabling a circular plastics supply chain beginning with PET bottles and polyester textile waste
MacroCycle Technologies, a developer of a novel PET & polyester textile waste upcycling technology, announced the close of a $6.5M seed financing round. 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. 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.
“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,” said Clean Energy Ventures Managing Partner Temple Fennell. “MacroCycle’s solution to upcycle plastics tackles an increasingly severe waste issue to create an economically and environmentally circular plastics supply chain.”
“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,” says 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.
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.
“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,” said MacroCycle CEO Stwart Peña Feliz. “Our technology will be a key enabler for plastic circularity, as we allow our customers and suppliers to unlock the economic benefits of recycling.”
The groundwork for MacroCycle’s technology was laid during the academic work of Dr. Jan-Georg Rosenboom, co-founder and CTO of MacroCycle, and his colleagues at MIT, ETH Zurich and Politecnico Di Milano. With early support from the Breakthrough Energy Fellows program, MacroCycle scaled up its technology 100x from lab-scale beakers to a pilot plant reactor running at The Engine Accelerator’s facilities.
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.
