Advanced Recycling for Polyesters Technology Landscape Summary

Executive Summary

• The last decade has seen a significant increase in patent filings related to advanced recycling, particularly in enzymatic hydrolysis.

• Despite the need for further technological advancements, enzymatic hydrolysis is gaining more attention from the industry than other depolymerization routes.

• PET glycolysis and methanolysis are economically comparable to mechanical recycling and virgin manufacturing.

• Enzymatic recycling technologies are still in the demonstration stage (TRL 3 to 5) and require further development to improve technical performance and economic viability. Nevertheless, the field of enzymatic hydrolysis is dynamic with several emerging start-ups, while methanolysis is dominated by two main players and appears to be lacking in new technologies and start-ups.

• Technologies currently underperforming compared to chemical recycling and virgin plastic manufacturing should not be disregarded as low-potential solutions for plastic recycling. As these technologies mature, their performance is expected to improve.

Ubuntoo Landscape Assessment  

Ubuntoo proposes a Design Thinking approach by applying the Double Diamond framework to help organizations to expedite their sustainability agenda. The framework comprises two clear stages. The first one consists of the landscaping of industry megatrends and definitions of focus areas, and the second stage includes the discovery of solutions and innovations that are the right fit for our client's context and sustainability challenges.

The landscape exercise assesses the short- to long-term industry panorama for advanced recycling of polyesters to identify megatrends, nascent innovations, and emergent technologies that receive attention and investment from industry players. The landscape methodology comprises three distinct pieces: 

News, blogs, and articles: used to identify megatrends and the landscape of existing solutions and developments to be implemented within the next 6 months. In this stage, we gather insights from more than 60,000 global news sources and over 1,000,000 blogs.

Companies: used for competitive scouting, identification of nascent start-ups, and adjacency solutions. In this stage, Ubuntoo will scrap information from a database of over 22M companies with metadata on founding year, investment amount received and investors, and more.

Patents: used for the identification of emerging technologies and innovations. Ubuntoo will gather insights from patents in more than 50 jurisdictions with metadata available on company assignee, filing location, status, etc.