Israeli Startup UBQ Says It Has The Answer To Recycling & The Circular Economy
Credit to Author: Steve Hanley| Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2019 00:05:45 +0000
Published on November 18th, 2019 | by Steve Hanley
November 18th, 2019 by Steve Hanley
Kibbutz Tze’Elim in Israel’s Negev Desert boasts a population of 464, but it just may be one of the most important communities on Earth. There, inside a locked building, UBQ Materials is making the raw material for plastics from ordinary household refuse that would otherwise end up in landfills.
“The magic that we’re doing is we’re taking everything — the chicken bones, the banana peels,” says Jack “Tato” Bigio, the chief executive at UBQ Materials. “We take this waste, and we convert it. In UBQ, nothing goes to waste. Metals and glass go to recyclers. There’s no water in the process, so it’s really efficient in terms of the environment,” he says. According to the company’s website:
UBQ’s revolutionary process makes new, raw material out of all Residual Municipal Solid Waste (RMSW) destined for landfills: food waste, soiled cardboard, paper and mixed plastics. By providing a highly pliant, climate-positive raw material, and displacing finite oil-based resources in the production of plastic products, we help manufacturers and brands alike to reduce their carbon footprint. The larger we scale, the more landfills are rendered obsolete, the faster carbon emissions are reduced, and the better the environment is preserved.
Image credit: UBQ Materials
The company has been testing and refining its technology for nearly a decade in an attempt to find a solution to the nearly 2 billion tons of plastic waste created worldwide every year, a problem that has been exacerbated by China’s decision to ban the import of plastic waste a year ago. Skeptics abound, but some who have visited UBQ recently are beginning to change their minds.
Antonis Mavropoulos, a Greek chemical engineer who is president of the International Solid Waste Association, tells , “If we want to advance to a more sustainable future, we don’t only need new technologies, but new business models. In this case, we have a byproduct worth a very good price in the market.” Tato Bigio says the company is already generating a positive revenue stream.
Duane Priddy, CEO of the Plastic Expert Group and a former principal scientist at Dow Chemical, is more measured in his assessment. “Although we remain skeptical, we look forward to evaluating UBQ products and continuing to learn more about the UBQ technology to further validate their findings and broad applications.” If the technology proves commercially viable, “it could be a game changer for the global environment,” he says.
UBQ recently asked Swiss environmental consulting firm Quantis to evaluate its process. Quantis found that keeping decomposing organic waste out of landfills and using it to create second generation plastics could significantly cut methane, the gas that in the short term contributes more to global warming than carbon dioxide. Substituting a ton of UBQ’s pellets for the same amount of polypropylene saves the equivalent of about 15 tons of carbon dioxide emissions it says, Adding as little as 10% of the material can make the result carbon neutral, depending on the type of plastic being created.
UBQ is tight-lipped about its technology, but biotechnology expert Oded Shoseyov, a professor at Hebrew University, says melting plastics and waste creates a homogeneous substance strengthened by fibers in the organic ingredients. The trash arriving at the plant is sorted and culled, starting by pulling out large objects like shoes and coffee pots that don’t belong in the refuse stream. Then it passes through a process that separates out ferrous and nonferrous metals, then glass and rocks, before it is shredded into a grayish brown confetti.
What happens next depends on the needs of the end user. If the material is going to be used in injection molding, elements that could damage delicate molds are removed. But if the material’s final fate is composite bricks that can be used in construction, the sorting is less rigorous.
The conversion stage takes place in a building where as much as 5 tons of waste are fed into a multi-chamber reactor that sits behind a closed sliding door to block prying eyes. Temperatures up to 400º C break down the organic matter into its core elements. It is then re-engineered into a matrix through a secret chemical and physical process that results in what Bigio calls “a thermoplastic, composite, bio-based, sustainable, climate-positive material” — a gray powder that feels like ashes. The final stage turns that powder into long, spaghetti-like strands that are cooled and cut into round or cylindrical pellets in an array of colors as specified by customers.
UBQ has publicly acknowledged only one customer, an Israeli company named Plasgad that makes pallets, crates, and other products. In August, UBQ announced that 2,000 Plasgad-manufactured recycling bins were headed to the Central Virginia Waste Management Authority. Those bins, made with UBQ pellets, can be recycled in the future using the UBQ process.
The company says it is in advanced talks with numerous multinational corporations interested in utilizing its material. Prominent names are on its board as advisers, including Roger Kornberg, a Stanford professor and Nobel laureate for chemistry. It is continuing to investigate new applications and test characteristics like durability. UBQ says its material doesn’t break down and can have more than half a dozen lives, unlike most plastics, which can be recycled only once or twice before they degrade too much to be of further use.
The facility can produce about 1 ton of UBQ material per hour, which works out to about 7,000 tons annually. Another site, with annual capacity of up to 100,000 tons, is being planned and Bigio says the process can scale up quickly and easily. Demand is huge, he says, with the global plastic injection industry being a $325 billion a year market. Bigio declines to give specifics but says the company is already profitable.
Until now, the biggest problem with recycling plastic is that most of it is contaminated with the products it was created to hold or other detritus after it is discarded. If UBQ is successful in showing the world how to create a truly circular economy, the world will be on its way to conquering the pernicious problem of plastic waste.
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Steve Hanley Steve writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his home in Rhode Island and anywhere else the Singularity may lead him. His motto is, “Life is not measured by how many breaths we take but by the number of moments that take our breath away!” You can follow him on Google + and on Twitter.