On a city street, heaps of discarded bottles, food wrappers, and worn-out polyester clothing spill from overfilled bins—mountains of plastic destined for incinerators or landfills. Every year, millions of tonnes of these stubborn materials escape recycling, persisting for generations as pollution. DePoly, a Swiss startup, is tackling this urgent issue with a breakthrough chemical recycling technology. Their process converts hard-to-recycle plastics and polyester textiles into virgin-quality raw materials, enabling true circularity.

 

Unlike conventional recycling, DePoly’s proprietary process handles even mixed, coloured, or contaminated PET waste. By breaking plastics down into their original monomers through depolymerisation, the company enables the creation of new plastics and textiles without any loss in quality. Recovering these raw materials rather than relying on fossil fuels contributes to a truly circular plastics industry. According to recent life-cycle assessments, DePoly’s technology can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 70%  compared to conventional virgin monomer production, while significantly reducing reliance on fossil feedstocks. These measurable gains highlight the tangible environmental impact and credibility of DePoly’s approach.

Mechanical recycling works only for select plastics and requires clean, sorted materials. Many complex PET waste streams and polyester textiles are left out, ending up in incinerators or landfills. Sending these materials to a landfill not only generates environmental harm but also burdens municipalities with significant disposal costs, while the value of the raw materials is essentially lost. In contrast, recovering these materials through DePoly’s technology allows their transformation into valuable inputs for new products, unlocking economic value and directly benefiting both industry and communities. By filling this gap, DePoly’s technology transforms difficult waste into valuable resources and creates a strong business case for circularity, helping close the loop in the plastics value chain.

 

This pioneering approach has earned DePoly international recognition. The company has been named among the Top 100 Swiss Startups and recently raised $23 million to build a 500-tonne-per-year showcase plant—an important step toward scaling up and making circular plastics a reality. A major recent milestone is DePoly’s selection for the prestigious European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator—one of Europe’s most competitive deep-tech funding programmes. In a highly selective round, only 61 companies from 17 countries were chosen, including just four Swiss startups. This support will help DePoly advance from pilot to commercial scale, accelerating the industrialisation of circular plastics technology.

 

At Inspiralia, we are proud to have supported DePoly at key stages of its funding journey—from the Startup Innovation Programme to the successful EIC Accelerator application. Collaborating with innovators like DePoly is inspiring, as their work shows how deep-tech can create real environmental impact. We congratulate the DePoly team on this achievement and look forward to their next steps toward industrial-scale deployment—helping build a future where plastics are reused again and again as valuable resources, not waste.