Twelve early-stage startups providing technologies around the circular economy for materials showcased their innovations to attendees at the recent Rethinking Materials Summit in London.
Rethinking materials to eliminate plastic waste and create a circular economy requires patience, collaboration, passion, and, for emerging technologies, funding. This is according to Harriet Lamb, CEO of WRAP (The Waste and Resources Action Programme), a UK-based climate action NGO, who delivered the keynote speech at last week's conference in London, aptly titled the Rethinking Materials Summit.
The two-day event brought together over 350 participants (both in-person and virtual) from 34 countries to showcase and connect pioneering businesses that are reinventing how materials in consumer products and packaging are produced, consumed, reused, and financed.
An interesting feature of the specially designed event to connect early-stage technology startups with potential investors was a series of three technology demonstration sessions, each featuring four companies. The session topics included "Material Innovation for Performance and Functionality," "Innovation for Decarbonization and Material Circularity," and "Digital Solutions for Material Efficiency."
The following are highlights of some of the featured companies:
Kelpi: Described by co-founder and CEO Neil Morris as a material innovation company, Kelpi has developed a compostable bioplastic material made from algae that can replace single-use plastics for food, personal care, and cosmetic packaging. Kelpi only uses cultivated algae because, as Morris explained, there is always a concern about the impact on marine environments when algae is harvested from the ocean. The company is working with algae producers in East Asia but is shifting towards agriculture in the UK and Canada. Currently, Morris shared that the company is hindered in its efforts to develop the technology as it awaits food contact approval.
Solutum: Based in Israel, Solutum envisions eliminating plastic waste altogether. That's what Sharon Barak, co-founder and CEO of the company, claimed during her show-and-tell at the conference, demonstrating how bioplastics created with Solutum's exclusive compound allow flexible film to dissolve in water. Solutum's compound harnesses natural biochemical processes to dissolve into natural biomass, including CO2 and H2O, in water at room temperature. The company controls the compound's temperature sensitivity to water through unique mechanisms, offering a range of predetermined dissolution temperatures and times, enabling it to adapt to a broader range of applications and plastic substitutions. The material can operate in existing equipment and is recyclable without impacting waste streams.
Again: Based in the UK, Again offers reuse solutions for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies, particularly beverage brands using glass packaging. According to Brian Matuszewski, Director of Partnerships at Again, who presented at the summit, the company collects, sorts, cleans, and returns packaging to the brands, with the capacity to process 0.5 million packs per month through robotics. The company operates a network of proprietary CleanCells co-located in logistics centers, which recondition the packages to the highest quality standards. Each package is labeled, allowing Again to track the number of loops a package has gone through, removing containers from circulation when they have reached their maximum lifespan for reuse. The company pays collection partners and retailers (operating deposit systems) for each packaging unit they receive. Again is currently working with Diageo, Coca-Cola, and AB InBev.
