Greenback - on a mission to develop circular solutions for packaging waste

by Startacus Admin

Greenback tackles the provenance of plastic materials by building a globally distributed, decentralised network of advanced recycling plants near the sources of plastic waste.

It’s time to talk about plastic again! The term ‘advanced recycling’ is a broad one that encompasses a range of chemical processes that allow plastics to be converted back into materials ready to use for new purposes. We have written about several startups involved in such processes in the past, with the likes of Plastech and their building aggregate, and BioCellection’s virgin-quality chemicals.

One of the big problems with this process on a large scale is that the resulting material is so similar to new plastic that it comes with the risk of fraud, as companies try to pass off fresh plastic as the product of advanced recycling. So tracking the provenance of the materials is important.

This is where London-based greentech startup Greenback comes in. They are, as you may have guessed, dedicated to taking on the challenge of tracking provenance with a decentralised network of chemical recycling plants, each connected to a blockchain-based verification platform.

With both financial incentives and technology, the startup encourages the collection of plastics that are otherwise hard to recycle, depositing it into these chemical recycling plants, ideally close to the landfills that the plastic would otherwise be dumped in, cutting transportation costs and making the whole process more efficient. In those plants, the plastic is converted into pyrolysis oil using microwaves, and then transported back to petrochemical companies to be turned back into fresh plastic.

Ensuring the process remains genuine and transparent, a combination of internet of things (IoT) devices and artificial intelligence identifies the materials passing through, and the blockchain ensures that this provenance remains true and unaltered. This allows confidence in new food-grade packaging.

Greenback is building a decentralised network of these plants near post-consumer plastic waste sources all around the world, making the process faster, fairer, and more efficient.

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• #environment
• #plastic
• #recycling
• #greenback

Published on: 25th March 2022