Plastic recycling has a problem. Novoloop is helping to solve it | WIRED

Of the 380 million tonnes of plastic produced worldwide every year, only around 18 per cent is currently recycled. The rest is either burned, sent to landfill, or dumped in the open – which is why plastic and microplastics are now being discovered everywhere from the arctic tundra to mountain summits – and even falling from the sky.

Despite growing demand for recycled content, recycling rates in the UK and elsewhere have plateaued in recent years. Part of the problem is technological. The most-recycled plastics, such as PET (used in drinks bottles) and HDPE (milk bottles and yoghurt pots), are semi-rigid, easy to sort, and simple to melt down into their constituent parts. But that’s only a small part of our plastic consumption. Another large percentage of plastic packaging is low-density polyethylene or LDPE, found in the films and wraps that enshroud everything from our fridge leftovers to the vast pallets of produce that are delivered to supermarkets. “Polyethylene or PE is the most commonly used plastic in the world,” says Miranda Wang, co-founder and CEO of California-based recycling company Novoloop. “Upwards of 150 million metric tonnes are used annually in low-performance applications like bubble and pallet wrap, agricultural film, shampoo bottles, take-out containers and product packaging.”

Film and plastic bags are often soiled with food and other biological waste, and they can ensnare and jam sorting machines at recycling facilities, so are typically removed and incinerated or sent to landfill instead. Even when they are recycled, the new plastic produced from films can be of low quality. As a result, Wang says, “In the US, only 5-7 per cent of LDPE is recycled today.”

Wang and her co-founder, Jeanny Yao, first became interested in recycling while growing up in Vancouver, Canada. “In Grade 10 we took a field trip to a waste transfer station, and it was shocking to see how much of this waste was plastic,” Wang says. “We realised how small of an impact we were actually making by getting our peers to recycle bottles and how much bigger this problem actually was.”

As a school science project, Wang and Yao worked on using bacteria to break down plastic waste found in a local river. The idea won them the Sanofi Biogenius challenge, a national science prize in Canada – and international acclaim. The pair decided to launch a company, initially called BioCellection (later changed to Novoloop), to develop the technology. But bacteria took too long to make a difference as an industrial application. “We founded Novoloop while we were still in college. At that time, we hadn’t yet worked out the technology, and we didn’t know how the company would commercialise it when we had a product to sell,” Wang says.

Instead they turned to chemistry, and developed a novel chemical recycling method, which they call Accelerated Thermal Oxidative Decomposition (ATOD). The technique uses a low-heat process to break polyethylene down in a reactor into its constituent chemicals. Novoloop then upcycles these chemical building blocks into new, high-performance materials.

For Wang, that’s an important distinction, as many recurrent recycling methods often downcycle plastics into lower-grade plastics. “Instead of only breaking down single-use plastic into products like fuel or carbon dioxide, Novoloop is upcycling this plastic trash into polymers that are designed for long lifetimes with high-performance properties,” Wang says. ATOD also emits up to 68 per cent less CO₂ equivalent than equivalent industrial processes.

Novoloop’s first product, Oistre, is a type of thermoplastic urethane (TPU). TPU is commonly used in footwear soles and waterproof clothing; the fashion industry alone uses an estimated 150,000 metric tonnes annually. Oistre performs as well as virgin TPU in performance tests – it is both strong, flexible and highly durable – and crucially is worth 50 times more than the PE it is recycled from, making it genuine upcycling. “Globally, 550,000 metric tonnes of TPU is used each year. If brand owners were to adopt Oistre into their TPU applications this could prevent up to 275,000 metric tonnes of PE plastics from entering landfills and rivers every year,” Wang says. The climate benefits would also be significant. “Oistre also contains up to 45 per cent lower CO2e than fossil fuel-based TPU.”

Novoloop has partnered with the City of San Jose to upcycle its municipal PE waste, and the company is now partnering with brands to turn Oistre into products. “We partner with brands that are concerned about sustainability, namely footwear, apparel, automotive and sporting goods industries to name just a few,” Wang says. “By brands adopting Oistre we can keep a significant amount of plastic waste out of landfills, incinerators or waterways – up to 25,000 metric tonnes per year by 2026.”

In 2019, Wang was named a Rolex Awards for Enterprise Laureate, to support Novoloop’s work in addressing plastic pollution. Launched in 1976 to mark the 50th anniversary of the iconic Oyster wrist watch, the annual Rolex Awards for Enterprise have to date supported 155 exceptional individuals from around the world whose work is dedicated to addressing global challenges, preserving our natural and cultural heritage, or advancing our understanding of planet Earth. “[Rolex] has connected me with an inspiring community during my early and formative years as an entrepreneur. Without the Rolex Awards, it would have been much harder to move Novoloop’s technology forward when we were still in early development,” Wang says.

Novoloop is growing fast, as are other novel solutions to our plastic problem. According to a recent Google-funded research paper, chemical recycling capacity needs to increase by up to 135 times by 2040 in order to keep up with our plastic waste. Meanwhile, Novoloop is developing new materials and recycling methods for other forms of waste plastic, in its mission to transform single-use and poorly-recycled plastics into long-lasting, valuable materials. “We are obsessed with showing what can be done with plastic waste,” Wang says. “We will be expanding our capabilities to break down plastic waste and build a larger and larger platform of performance products to keep the carbons inside plastics in play.”

For Wang, Oistre is a small but significant step towards solving the plastic pollution crisis. “By upcycling PE into Oistre, Novoloop is proving that there is high value in post-consumer plastics that today’s recycling technology cannot recycle,” Wangs says. “And that a circular economy is achievable.”

To find out more about Rolex Laureate Miranda Wang’s initiative, please visit Rolex.org, and explore our Planet Pioneers partnership page here.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK