World Environment Day 2024

Last year, the focus of World Environment Day was on Beating Plastic Pollution. The 2024 edition focuses on Land Restoration, Desertification and Drought Resilience, which is becoming a major challenge in more and more countries. Unfortunately, we are starting to see summers becoming hotter, dryer and droughts occurring at a higher rate and for longer periods of time.

At DePoly, we strongly believe that protecting the environment comes, in part, from tackling plastic pollution.
Plastic is used in pretty much everything, due to its valuable properties such as conservation usage (packaging), polyvalence (can be molded in almost any shape or form), easiness and extremely low cost of production. However, there is one big downside. Today, less than 10% of plastic worldwide is recycled, that means more than 90% is either incinerated, landfilled or unfortunately thrown out in the nature.
Especially in less economically developed countries, where waste treatment and recycling capabilities are limited, waste is usually discarded that way. This is terrible for the environment as it trickles down into rivers and ultimately in the ocean.
With over 400M tons of plastic produced every year, it is urgent to act on creating a sustainable circular economy for plastics. This is exactly what we are working towards at DePoly.

In 2020, DePoly’s 3 co-founders were able to develop a chemical reaction that would breakdown PET plastic back to its founding blocks called PTA (Purified Terephthalic Acid) and MEG (Mono Ethylene Glycol). Through this process, unsorted and dirty PET can be treated, recycled, and a new lifecycle can begin as recycled PET product. This brings us a step closer towards curving the line for a sustainable circular economy of plastics. One main advantage of the DePoly technology is that there is no need for added heat or pressure for the reaction to happen. Furthermore, as mentioned before we do not need to pre-process the feedstock such as separate or wash it for the reaction to be effective. Our technology enables the same level of PTA purity as the oil-based counterparts, meaning that the cycle can happen repeatedly, without the loss of quality for the end product.
At DePoly, we challenge the status-quo, and our R&D team keeps on innovating and trying to find new applications to other types of plastic to expand our solution to more than just PET.

Our proof of concept is established with our current pilot plant, located in Switzerland, which can treat up to 50 Tons of feedstock per year. We are gearing up with the start of the construction of our Showcase plant, also located in Switzerland, that will be able to absorb up to 500 Tons per year.
Making sure we reduce plastic waste in nature and increase recycling capabilities for plastic is a crucial step we need to take to actively help our environment. It’s time to restore the environment to what it was before and leave the world a better place for future generations!

Are you a company or plastic producer? Are you curious about one of our samples and looking at an alternative to traditionally produced PTA? Contact our team for a joint project: sales@depoly.co