Epoch Biodesign
Ep. 45 Giving New Life to Plastic WasteToday, only 2% of plastics are truly recycled, the rest is downcycled, burned, landfilled, or leaked into the environment. Epoch gives new life to plastic waste by converting it into everyday chemicals.
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Why We Made this Film
Today, a mere 10% of plastics are recycled. When those plastics do make it to the right place, however, they’re often improperly sorted and subsequently discarded. The items that do get recycled require an energy-intensive and relatively dirty process that creates lower-quality outputs. But even as the demand for fossil fuels decreases, Big Oil is throwing its eggs in the plastics basket - and from the EPA's more conservative estimate to the more liberal one, that’s a basket creating somewhere from 100 to 500 million tons of CO2.
Epoch is a startup designing biological processes that use enzymes to transform plastic waste into everyday chemicals. These chemicals can be used to produce cleaning products, coatings, adhesives, and fertilizers. The process builds alternative circular chemicals. In other words, it essentially displaces fossil fuel feedstocks and creates a profitable plastic upcycling system.
