VERIDIS: Technological Innovation to recycle plastic
A sustainability platform for the textile industry, a biodegradable packaging made of hemp and mycelium, an independent sourcing platform for sustainable packaging, a digital marketplace for used electrical and electronic equipment, a technology-driven platform to connect informal waste pickers to the recycled plastic market and a technological machine to analyse plastic composition – these are the ideas developed by the six Green Alley Award finalists of 2023. The last finalist we’re introducing to you is Veridis from the Netherlands.
Veridis is developing a plastic analysis machine that revolutionizes (recycled) plastic quality control by scaling up sample sizes with a factor 100.000 enabling the use of recycled plastics in high value products. Veridis focuses on making currently unusable recycled plastics usable and giving insight into the daily recycling stream. Their aim is to help the plastic recycling industry by giving it a new (patented) analysis method to standardize material grading and certification. With that, Veridis tackles the industry’s problems like unknown material properties, not being able to recycle dark plastics, time constraints, expensive and limited analysis options and uncertainty in quality control due to the complexity of all the different plastic types (Did you know there are more than 250 different plastic types that cannot be mixed together when making new high-quality products like foils or your shampoo bottles?).
The technological sector has great innovations! Every day, more and more companies bring new ideas and create new machines! What do you think makes your machine unique?
Our MADSCAN system is the first analysis technology specifically developed to analyse plastics and at large, representative volumes. Existing methods are not specialized in just plastics, they just happen to also analyse plastics and are effective at a small scale or in controlled laboratory environments. The plastic recycling industry, however, is not a controlled environment. The current analysis methods are not designed for large-scale high-quality plastic recycling and, therefore, fall short when the industry needs reliable, continuous material information. This leads to performance issues when the performance of the material does not match with what the analysis says. Due to this, using recycled content in high-quality products is risky because we never exactly know what we are recycling in the first place. The industry tells us that we need a standardized method to grade and certify material reliably and we believe we can enable this with our technology.
You are planning to get a patent on your technology, what are your next steps afterwards?
Actually, since our application , our patent has been approved, meaning that we can now say that indeed, our MADSCAN technology is patented! However, we have found additional patentable findings. We are now in the process of building the commercial system and building our database, but these other findings will be combined into a larger patent for the whole system, further solidifying the robustness and protection of our technology.
How do you improve plastic recycling? Can you please explain the process in simple words.
In short, Veridis works towards standardising material grading and certification so that the plastic recycling industry can better grade and also price their materials for specific products in which we cannot reliably use recycled materials yet.
When you want to make something, you need to have a ‘recipe’ and have the right ingredients so that you can produce a reliable quality. What do we put in, how well does the production process function and what comes out? That will also allow you to guarantee the quality to your buyers. But, plastics are complex products, and just 3% of unwanted impurities makes a batch unusable for high-quality products. Knowing what you buy, produce and sell is of vital importance to assure product quality and safety. Because our technology can measure accurately what’s in a larger batch, we guarantee our clients an exact insight into the material, improve their production processes and ensure a better material grading and quality. This improves their recycling processes and makes their products more valuable.
Building a startup from scratch is not an easy task and there are many challenges. So far, what has been the greatest challenge you had to overcome?
As a deep tech startup developing a new technology, we do have higher development costs. We have been able to come up with creative solutions to bootstrap our technology, but securing funding with the right partners is of course an ongoing process that we need to balance. Also, the market is vast and complex, and we get many requests and questions if we can measure X or Y and if we can do this or that etc. Staying on track and making adjustments based on what the market really needs without losing focus by focusing on too many challenges at once is also something that we have to stay sharp on. Resources and time are limited, and we cannot chase every bone that we see, even if we’d like to. Winning the final would definitely help us to hire more crucial engineers to develop faster and bring our product to the market faster!
Please complete our sentence: The world needs a circular economy because…
…it’s the only just thing to do, for ourselves and the billions of humans that will still be born on this planet after us.
Would you like to meet Veridis and experience the award ceremony live in Berlin? Register now for the event and meet our finalists in live Berlin on 27th April 2023, 6pm CET.