The round was led by global climate VC, Clean Energy Ventures, and Volta Circle, the investment firm backed by the founders of PET production and recycling leaders, Indorama Ventures. KDT Ventures and Neotribe Ventures also participated. MacroCycle will use the funding to grow operations by 50% and scale its pilot plant facilities to meet the demand for its upcycled PET and polyester resin from initial customers.  

The production and disposal of plastics today makes up more than 5% of the globe’s total CO2 emissions – almost twice that of the entire aviation industry. Only 15% of plastics are recycled and the rest end up in landfills, waterways, or are incinerated. For decades, attempts to break this cycle have failed to cut through commercially because two major barriers remain – waste contamination, and energy intensity.

Modern approaches, such as turning plastic waste into the molecular building blocks of plastic (monomers), or transforming it back to fossil fuels, require vast amounts of energy. While creating uncontaminated, reusable end products has repeatedly proved too expensive. Both limit the competitiveness of such approaches, which prevents them from ever becoming scalable, commercially viable replacements for fossil fuel-derived plastics.

Plastic circularity

In stark contrast, MacroCycle’s technology upgrades plastic waste into its previous high-quality “virgin-grade” form, without having to break the plastic down. Its innovative chemistry and selective non-toxic reagents simplify the process so that it requires up to 80% less energy than fossil-based PET production, and at least 50% lower capital expenditure than competing chemical or biologic recycling methods.

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

Building momentum from strong scientific foundations

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 programme, MacroCycle has already scaled up its technology 100x from lab-scale beakers to a pilot plant reactor running at The Engine Accelerator’s facilities in Massachusetts.

The seed funding will be used to further expand operations and scale new pilot plants, where MacroCycle will look to recycle PET bottles and polyester textile waste from customers with large packaging waste footprints across the cosmetics, textiles, home goods, food and beverage industries, 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.

Catia Cesari, Managing Partner of Volta Circle 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.”

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.”

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