BioCellection develops $ 5m technology for upcycling plastics

27 / 01 / 2020

By Marwa Nassar -

BioCellection,whose founder is Miranda Wang, has managed to invent a $ 5 million technology that breaks down plastics into chemical building blocks, upcycling them into higher value materials for manufacturing.

The 25-year-old girl – the winner of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) Young Champions of the Earth prize in 2018 – believed in the importance of developing a plastic waste recycling technology in order to get rid of the killing plastic waste.

It is estimated that over 100 million marine animals are killed each year by plastic waste at the international level.

“Globally, only 9 percent of plastics produced are actually recycled. That’s because as a society, we lack recycling technologies that can make virgin-quality products from plastic waste,” Wang said.

“My project is a social impact startup developing and scaling up a new technology to recycle unrecyclable plastics. Over the past year, the project has snowballed, and we are seeing massive interest in this area,” she said.

The first engineering drawings for the technology scale-up have been completed, and multiple materials from the resulting purified compounds from breaking down plastics have been tested.

The company has already completed two thirds of a pilot program to test the technology at scale with the City of San José, California, United States, and other tests have already been completed with Google among others.

The team has expanded, with eight new hires instead of the projected four, winning grants and prizes including the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, Pritzker Environmental Genius Award and MIT Solve.