How DePoly's Plastic Recycling achieves Cost-parity With Virgin Plastic
DePoly is breaking recycling barriers to bring plastic one big step closer to a circular economy
Welcome to The Green Techpreneur - where nature-loving climate founders and investors connect, collaborate, accelerate and celebrate impact!
We offer a Climate Marketplace to help you raise funds and founder-led stories packed with insight. Join our growing network of 10,200+ climate tech champions shaping the future.
🔥 For Investors: Register on the Climate Marketplace. We don’t take a commission on deals, and by signing up, you’ll receive exclusive access to our investor newsletter with top startup deal flow directly to your inbox.
🌱 Featured Startup Spotlight: Construex 🌱
Watch this exclusive explainer video to discover Construex, now raising Series A €22,600,000, listed on our Investor Marketplace! 🚀
🚀 Raise Faster: £200M+ Raised. 160+ Climate Startups Listed.
We’ve just made it easier than ever to list your startup on our investor-facing Climate Marketplace—no calls, no wait. If you're a climate tech founder raising funds, you can now purchase a listing directly and get in front of active investors.
"Freigeist sees the Climate Marketplace as one of the most valuable platforms"
Freigeist sees the Climate Marketplace as one of the most valuable platforms for energy and cleantech start-ups in Europe. We have sourced deals, such as Lilium Aviation and Kraftblock Energy Storage and appreciate the supportive collaboration a lot."
— Niklas Hebborn, Partner, Freigeist
DePoly is breaking recycling barriers to bring plastic closer to a circular economy - they’ve just raised $23M to scale.
With roots in Canada and a background in chemistry, Samantha Anderson, CEO and Co- Founder of DePoly, moved to Switzerland to pursue a PhD—an academic journey that would soon lead to something much bigger.
She worked in a university lab at EPFL alongside the fellow PHD students who would become her Co-Founders - Chris Ireland and Bardiya Valizadeh. In 2018, their research trajectory took a sudden turn. Articles had began surfacing about microplastics—not just in oceans, but in people. Researchers didn’t yet know the full health impacts, but the implications were deeply concerning. For Samantha, evidence that microplastics were entering the human body through food was the moment the problem became too urgent to ignore.
Every year, the United Nations Environment Programme estimates that we generate around 400 million tonnes of plastic waste—a staggering jump from just 2.1 million tonnes in 1950. If this trajectory continues, Earth.org warns that global plastic pollution could surpass one billion tonnes annually by 2060.
Our handling of plastic waste paints a bleak picture of a world drowning in plastic. According to British waste management firm Business Waste, roughly 60% ends up in landfills or the natural environment. Only 15% is recycled, 17% is incinerated, and more than 22% is discarded directly into ecosystems. The impact is devastating.
Microplastics have been found not only in every nook and cranny of the earth, they’re now in human organs—including the liver, kidneys, and placenta—while plastic chemicals are linked to cancers, developmental issues, and immune system disorders.
“We saw that nobody was offering a full solution,” she explains. “The recycling industry, especially the oil sector, had been misleading people for decades about what plastic recycling could actually achieve.” Investigations by NPR and PBS Frontline revealed that plastic manufacturers have been selling the public a lie about plastic recycling - in order to boost their continued plastic sales and abate environmental concerns.
It was clear to Samantha that meaningful change wouldn’t come from within an industry more interested in boosting profit at all costs - it needed disruption.
The PhD student team took action to tackle the problem head-on. With a shared background in chemistry, they focused on a chemical solution to handle the waste that conventional systems can’t.
Within six months, after running hundreds of reactions, they had a working prototype. That side hustle project evolved into DePoly - one of Europe’s best funded recycling scale-ups.
Today, it has grown from a three-person lab initiative to a 40+ person climate tech startup, set to rapidly scale after having just closed a $23 million funding round led by MassMutual Ventures alongside Founderful, ACE & Company, Angel Invest, Zürcher Kantonalbank, BASF Venture Capital, Beiersdorf Venture Capital, and Syensqo.
VCo2 is the go-to podcast and newsletter for anyone building or investing in impact startups. Every Thursday, we dive deep into the mind of an investor to uncover their approach to impact startups. On Sundays, we feature a standout startup to keep on your radar. Join us and stay ahead in the world of impact investing!
🌿 Help Shape the Future of Biodiversity Net Gain
Made in Bloomsbury is building a BNG Index to better track the environmental and financial value of biodiversity. If you work in planning, policy, finance, ecology, or tech, we want your input.
📝 Take our 5-minute survey
Your insights will guide smarter, nature-positive tools for people, planet, and policy.
What makes you different?
The current bottle recycling system works by collecting and sorting out anything that can’t be reused—like contaminated items or complex materials such as multilayered plastics, fabrics, or coated containers (e.g., a water bottle used for painting). These often end up in landfills due to health and safety concerns.
Mechanical recyclers handle clean, sorted plastics well. But we specialize in the harder stuff:
Dirty, multilayered household waste
Contaminated plastics
Fabrics and textiles
Mixed pre- and post-industrial waste with metals and resins
This is where we shine.
Compared to other chemical recyclers, our process stands out. We don’t rely on high heat or pressure, which cuts energy use and cost. And our chemicals? They’re familiar, safe, and already used in food, drinks, and personal care products—think cooking bases, alcohols, and sunscreen ingredients.
Others use what I call designer chemistry—scientifically impressive, but costly and tough to scale. Our method is simpler, safer, and built for real-world impact.
It's easy to criticise broken systems, but once microplastics are in our food chain, we’re beyond debate. It’s time to act.
When will your cost-competitive recycled plastic come to market at scale?
Our pre-commercial plant is currently under construction and will serve as the blueprint for our first full-scale facility, targeted to launch by 2027 or 2028—just a couple of years away.
Scaling is the biggest challenge for any chemical recycler. You can’t leap from pilot to commercial overnight; it takes careful, step-by-step technical de-risking. That’s why we’re building a showcase plant first—to prove the tech, refine operations, and then scale up smartly.
Balancing ambition with a solid go-to-market strategy is key. Once the first commercial site is chosen, it will shape where and how future facilities roll out.
While we don’t yet process polyethylene groups—a known limitation we plan to address with future chemistry—we’ve had no issues with a wide range of other feedstocks. We're in the process of selecting a site for our first commercial plant, which will focus on two key waste streams: rigid plastics and fabric/wire-based materials commonly found in household waste.
Site selection is complex and involves evaluating feedstock access, regulations, labor costs, and budgets. This work is happening alongside the buildout of our showcase plant—critical groundwork to ensure smart, informed scaling.
Are We Finally on the Brink of a Circular Plastic Economy?
We’re making strong progress, but scale is still the missing piece. Momentum is building—regulatory support is growing, consumer demand for sustainable options is rising, and businesses are starting to view waste as a resource.
Many plastics, like PVC, were designed for durability, making them tough to recycle. But innovation is advancing. The real breakthrough will come when waste gains value. If recycling becomes cost-effective and waste is seen as an asset, we’ll unlock the investment and innovation needed for a circular economy.
Our recycled chemicals, such as PTA and MEG, match fossil-based equivalents in quality. If we can hit competitive pricing without a green premium, we’ll have a scalable, sustainable model.
The key is simple: when waste has value, it gets recovered and reused. That’s the vision - a circular system where recycling is the obvious economic and environmental choice.
How Will Strategic Investment Accelerate DePoly’s Vision?
Scaling is our top priority, and recent investment is key to reaching the pre-commercial stage. It enables us to build our first-of-a-kind plant, accelerate development through parallel workstreams, and bring critical expertise in-house.
Beyond funding, strategic investors add real value—offering engineering knowledge, market access, operational insight, and global networks. Partners like BASF, Meyer’s Dorf, and Science Cove have deepened our technical and strategic capabilities, while U.S.-backed VCs strengthen our position in key markets like the US and Canada, opening up eco-systems.
What’s Your Environmental Impact?
Our initial life cycle analysis (LCA) at the Gen One plant showed a 65% lower CO₂ footprint compared to virgin PET. Since then, we've advanced to Gen Two and are now building our showcase plant, which features major improvements like continuous processing and enhanced solvent recovery.
These upgrades are expected to further reduce our environmental impact, and we're updating our LCA to reflect this. While results are still pending, we’re confident the new analysis will show even greater CO₂ reductions.
What Does It Take to Build a Climate Tech Startup from Scratch?
All three of us co-founders came from academic backgrounds, so one of the first big learning curves was figuring out how to communicate our deep technical work in a way that made sense to non-experts. I’d spent over a decade in chemistry—so shifting to pitching, public speaking, and simplifying the science took real effort. As our team grew, we also had to evolve as leaders. When you're just three people, communication is easy. But at 50, things change, and we had to be intentional about how we grew—not just the company, but ourselves.
On Funding:
Switzerland was a great place to start. We leaned heavily on non-dilutive funding—grants like the Bridge Proof of Concept helped us extend salaries, continue research, and lay a foundation while we optimized our process. We also entered local competitions like Venture Kick, which sharpened our pitching skills and gave us more non-dilutive capital.
When COVID hit, we shifted much of our work remote and began looking more seriously at fundraising. That’s when I first met Alex from Founderful (then Wingman), who led our pre-seed round. Since then, we’ve raised mostly dilutive funding, with some grant support like the EIC. But honestly, each investor we’ve brought on has added value—whether through engineering insights, networks, or strategic input.
Key Insights for Climate Tech Founders:
If you're coming from academia, learning how to communicate your science is just as important as the science itself.
You have to grow with your company. Leadership and communication need to evolve as your team scales.
Non-dilutive funding—grants and pitch competitions—can be a huge asset early on. It buys you time and credibility without giving up equity.
Choose investors who bring more than money. The right people can help shape your company and accelerate your impact.
What’s Been the Most Rewarding Part of the Journey?
There's a really cool aspect of seeing something that you had on a little 400 milligram jar scale now operating in a big warehouse. For me, it was seeing the process scale, and what you dreamed about at the start coming to fruition. Seeing the people that we've brought in, team members who have jumped on the challenge and be so heavily invested. They've developed the process, even more than like we could have imagined - so experiencing these successes with them is super rewarding.
What mindset or philosophy guides you when making decisions?
“We really try to think of long-term consequences and avoiding short term noise. And so, the decisions that we make today, we have to stand behind them, but we also think that they have to stand the test of time.”
Every move we make—whether it's scaling technology, introducing new equipment, or developing innovative chemistry— we don’t just ask whether something works today, but whether it will continue to work tomorrow, next year, or even a decade from now.
This mindset has been especially crucial in today’s turbulent environment. From geopolitical instability to economic uncertainty, startups are constantly being tested. Building a company is already a leap into the unknown— global conflicts, trade wars, and shifting policies intensifies the pressure.
You can’t afford to dwell on the chaos. Tariffs, political shifts, market fluctuations—these things change weekly. What matters is staying focused on your core mission and maintaining the resilience to adapt.
Who Inspires You?
I'm not entirely sure I have a specific role model that I can name. I look at groups of people - it's the people in the startup community that are pushing forward and seeing them overcome their challenges. It's the scientists out there that are pushing the boundaries of everything we know.
…and When You’re Not in the office?
I love running and picked up climbing after moving to Switzerland—it's something I really got into with a group of friends who go outdoor sport climbing. When the weather’s good (and climate change hasn’t interfered too much), I also try to ski. But honestly, the snow levels have dropped noticeably since I first moved here, and I worry skiing might become less common over the next decade.
Do You Have a Favourite Quote?
The one I always tell myself during hard times is; “if it was easy, somebody else would have done it.”
💥 Find out how you can stand out on our Climate Marketplace to attract investor enquiries…
Just sign up on the platform and fill out the details about your fundraise to get exposure to 3,000 climate investors.
Further reading in my Forbes column:
New Plastic Recycling Method Achieves Cost-Parity With Virgin Plastic
Supply Chains in Chaos? These 5 Startups Turn Waste into Opportunity
Thank you for reading The Green Techpreneur.
🥂SparkTheTransition - to a kinder, greener, more just world!
"The world's favorite season is the spring. All things seem possible in May." - Edwin Way Teale"
 | A guest post by
|