Cleantech startup DePoly wins the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Award 2024

DePoly, ranked 10th in 2023, rises to the top: The Valais-based startup ranks first at the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Award 2024. Founded in 2020 by Samantha Anderson (CEO), Bardiya Valizadeh (CTO), and Christopher Ireland (CSO), the cleantech company is breaking new ground in plastic recycling.

For the 14th time, a jury of 100 investors and technology experts has selected the 100 most promising startups in Switzerland. DePoly is the winner of the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Award 2024. The project idea started in 2019 with the support of Venture Kick. Five years later the company employs 24 people and shows that plastic can also be circular.

Of the approximately 800,000 tonnes of plastic waste that accrues in Switzerland every year, only about 10% is recycled. This comprises mainly polyethylene terephthalate (PET) drink bottles, for which the association PET-Recycling Schweiz has set up nationwide collection logistics.
All other types of plastic – polyurethane, polypropylene, polyethylene, and polyamide are the best known – end up in municipal waste, as do PET components from discarded textiles. Several thousand tonnes of plastic end up in construction waste landfill sites. The rest is burned in waste incineration plants; thermally recycled, as it is somewhat euphemistically called. The reason is that plastic waste is rarely pure and usually contaminated from use. It has to be washed and sorted before being processed into secondary granulate.

DePoly, an EPFL spin-off based in Valais, has set itself the goal of turning traditional recycling logic on its head: raw materials are no longer separated before reprocessing, but after. The internationally patented process breaks down plastic polymers into monomers, such as PET into terephthalic acid or monoethylene glycol.

And that’s not all: thanks to a specific mix of catalysts and bases, the polymers can be broken down into monomers even at room temperature. This is a major advance over the energy-intensive melting processes used in traditional plastics recycling.

The process was invented by three chemists – Samantha Anderson, Bardiya Valizadeh, and Christopher Ireland – during their time together at EPFL’s branch in Sion. They founded DePoly in 2020 and today CEO Anderson can say with satisfaction: “The technical feasibility has been proven.”

In early summer this year, work began on an industrial demonstration facility in lower Valais. The new plant in Monthey, which will process 500 tonnes of plastic waste annually, is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year and start operations in the second quarter of 2025.

“We tap into three different material streams,” explains materials chemist Anderson: plastic from municipal waste, collected material from PET-Recycling Schweiz and plastic waste from companies that improve their carbon footprint through the DePoly partnership. The cleantech startup earns money by selling monomers to the plastics processing industry.

DePoly’s technology takes plastic recycling to a new level. It makes a world without plastic pollution conceivable and the vision of a global circular economy somewhat more realistic. This prospect attracted investors such as the venture capital arms of German companies BASF and Beiersdorf immediately after the company was founded.

The pre-seed round at the end of 2020 raised CHF 1.3 million, and the seed round in the summer of 2023 brought in CHF 12.5 million. Anderson is currently negotiating a Series A round: “We are aiming for between CHF 20 and 30 million in growth capital,” explains the Canadian-born entrepreneur.

The money will be used, inter alia, for the construction of two large plants, which should be operational in five years and will process a total of 100,000 tonnes – more than 10% of the plastic waste generated in Switzerland as a whole.



This article by Jost Dubacher was first published in the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Magazine 2024.