04.30.24-Startup-Ecosystem-Conference-Startups-MacroCycle

STWART PEÑA FELIZ: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Stwart Peña. And I am the co-founder and CEO of MacroCycle Technologies, the venture creating circular plastics with zero carbon emissions.

After meeting my co-founder and CTO of MacroCycle Technologies at an MIT class, that climate and energy ventures class last year, we decided to embark on this journey together to resolve our plastic crisis, a crisis that is amplified by the fact that less than 20% of all plastic globally produced actually ends up recycled, with the remaining amount ending up in our landfills, in our oceans, or it gets incinerated. This all results in 4.5% of all global CO2 emissions to be associated to the plastic lifecycle.

Why can't we recycle more and solve both of these problems? The predominant technology in the industry is mechanical recycling, a low-energy technology that can only downgrade the quality of the plastic. You can take a hard bottle made up of long polymers and turn it into a t-shirt made up of short polymers, but never the other way around. Eventually, that fiber has to be disposed of and end up in our landfills. And new fossil-derived plastic has to be produced to meet the demand of high-quality plastics in the world.

The technologies available to address this quality dilemma are the advanced recycling technologies. Unfortunately, they are too energy intensive, as they rely on breaking the polymer all the way down to monomers or fuel and then undergoing all the traditional petrochemical steps to arrive back to the original polymer. Best-case scenario, minimal carbon reduction; worst-case scenario, even more CO2 emissions compared to the traditional means of plastic production.

But this is where MacroCycle comes in. Instead of breaking bonds, we're making new ones. Through our patented technology, we're able to take the polymer chain and tie it with itself to create a new intermediate called a macrocycle, which is where the name of the company comes from.

In this new intermediate state, we're able to bypass all the energy-intensive steps that our competitors are required to take. When we extract those macrocycles and open them up again to produce the original polymer, they actually want to combine with each other to create a longer linear polymer chain compared to where we started with. Therefore, we can upcycle the starting waste into a virgin-like material.

This is what it looks like. We can take bottles and polyester of any kind and put it through our two-step process, where we exploit thermodynamics and catalysis to create this intermediate while removing contaminants, such as color, from our from the waste. We then extract those intermediates. And we can produce the virgin gray pellets ready for all relevant commercial applications as a drop-in solution.

And our process takes 80% less energy compared to traditional means of plastic production. And the remaining 20% can then be fully electrified with renewable energy to achieve recycling with zero carbon emissions. Our technology at scale can remove well over 1% of all global CO2 emissions.

So where do we fit in the industry? MacroCycle will take the plastic waste from the collector. And we will upcycle it into virgin gray pellets that will be provided to the bottlers that produce the bottles and the packaged goods for the brands that we all know. We can do this right now on a scale, at a cost basis, on par with virgin PET pricing, meaning that for us to be profitable, no green premium is required. A product that has allowed us to secure 10 customer agreements, including pay pallets to validate that our product can resolve their pain points.

But we're not done yet. I'm standing here today because we need to prove that our product is resilient for all types of industries. So my ask today is that if you are working for a company or know someone who works for a company that disposes of PET plastic or consumes PET plastics, connect them with us so we can send them our pellets to be able to prove that we can resolve their pain points regarding their circularity issues and Scope 3 emissions.

With that, I wanted to say thank you all for the time. And please do reach out because together, MacroCycle can create a cleaner more circular future for everyone today.