The infinite plastics recycling startup everyone in VC is talking about
Everyone is excited about Australia's Samsara Eco, which has developed tech to dissolve plastics in under an hour. Even VCs who aren't invested in it.
Imagine if we didn’t need to make plastic from fossil fuels ever again, and we could just reuse all of the existing plastic infinitely. You might have thought that was an impossible ambition, but when two different VCs mention their excitement around Samsara Eco, and it's not even in their portfolio, its hard not to pay attention.
Samsara Eco is an Australian envirotech company, born out of Main Sequence Ventures' entrepreneur-in-residence program in partnership with ANU, that uses enzyme-based technology to create infinite plastic recycling.
One of the VCs who initially mentioned it to me describes Samsara as the best good news story coming out of the burgeoning Australian climate tech scene. He says Samsara technology changes the status of all the plastic in our lives from "landfill" to "plastic stored in one form, and then we can then switch into whatever other form we want." And it does it without polluting our entire atmosphere and biosphere, he adds.
CEO Paul Riley says the technology could save 4% of all carbon output across the plastics and the chemicals industry and has set itself the goal of recycling 1.5 million tonnes of plastic a year by 2030.
The company has developed a library of polyester enzymes that breaks down plastic into its core molecule (enzymatic depolymerisation) in minutes, regardless of the colour, type and state of plastic. The result is a "virgin plastic" equivalent that can then be used to make new plastic products. Both the enzymes and the AI the company uses to rapidly develop the enzymes are patent protected.
