Accelerate to a Green Future

You throw household, industrial, or agricultural waste into a reactor, heat it to 1,000 degrees or more, and transform it into reusable raw materials such as syngas, carbon, minerals, and metals. With this technology, DOPS Recycling Technologies aims to enter the market.

ETB Global has developed a production process to manufacture bio-butadiene from bio-ethanol. This allows for the production of an important component for various plastics and rubbers from renewable sources.

Non-recyclable old paper and cardboard: in Europe, 20 million tons of it are burned each year. The Dutch company Recell converts this waste into sugars for bioplastics, aiming to green the chemical industry. Now that its successful demo factory has relocated to England, Recell plans to build a new facility that will be at least ten times larger.

Relement offers a biobased alternative for a key fossil ingredient in paint, glue, and other binders. The potential is enormous. “We have calculated that we can save about 3 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of product over the entire life cycle,” says co-founder Roger Blokland. However, there is one problem: scaling up as a chemistry startup is not that easy. How do they manage it?

Plastic from electronic devices, computers, cars, chip bags, or showerheads is currently recycled only sporadically into new, clean raw materials. Start-up Resolved Technologies has found a literal solution for this: dissolving it in a solvent. Next year, a pilot factory at the Chemelot chemical complex is expected to recycle 25 kilograms of plastic per hour using this method.

Finding a biodegradable alternative to polyester in clothing is considered the holy grail in the fight against plastic pollution. The Dutch R&D company Senbis aims to bring such a solution to market by 2030. For the first time, artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to significantly accelerate the entire development process.

Dutch wastewater is full of phosphates—a substance that is essential for life on Earth but is becoming increasingly scarce. On the other hand, phosphates pollute water and threaten biodiversity in lakes, rivers, and seas. They are found in the fertilizers that farmers use to enrich their fields and in our food. Through the ditches, runoff from the fields flows into rivers and the sea, and through our waste, phosphates from food enter the sewage system.

TORWASH develops several processing methods for sludge, wet mown grass, and mixed plastics, converting them into biofuels, biogas, fertilizers, and raw materials for new plastics.