Julia Curley – Enabling Circular Bioplastics

With EsterCycle, Julia Curley is using alcohol and a simple catalyst to break down bioplastics into their original building blocks.

Julia Curley

EsterCycle

Curley is the inventor and founder of EsterCycle, a chemical recycling technology that can make recycled plastics with like-new properties and decreased environmental impacts, enabling circularity for bioplastics.

During West Gate, Curley is validating and demonstrating feasibility for scaling up while generating sufficient material for industrial collaborators to test.

According to a Science of The Total Environment journal article about single-use plastics, roughly half of all plastics are discarded after one use, with most ending up in a landfill or leaching into the environment. This has caused an ecological crisis and is a waste of valuable carbon feedstocks. Current mechanical recycling infrastructure cannot meet the need for recycling complex waste streams including materials made from multiple kinds of plastic.

EsterCycle is a circular recycling technology that uses methanol and a catalyst to break down petroleum and bio-based polyester plastics to their basic building blocks. The technology can transform complex and impure post-consumer waste to recycled plastics with excellent material properties and decreased environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions and fossil feedstock consumption.

EsterCycle breaks down mixtures of polymers that cannot currently be recycled in one pot, which alleviates the burden of sorting on consumers and materials reclamation facilities. Additionally, the EsterCycle process is tolerant to a wide range of contaminants and additives found in post-consumer plastic waste. Techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment have shown that EsterCycle will decrease the associated environmental impacts of plastic production while remaining economically competitive with the manufacture of new plastic.

Status

Bench scale

Industry

Polymer manufacturing

Potential Markets

• Single-use plastic waste generators
• Polymer manufacturers
• Recycling facilities

Looking For

• Industry mentors
• Funding
• Strategic partnerships
• Customer identification
• Space (office/lab) recommendations