In November 2019, PBS aired a special called “The Plastic Problem” that shed light on the out-of-control issue of plastic waste 70 years in the making that will result in more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050. Fact is, plastics have been integral to some of the greatest advancements of the modern age, including those in aerospace, automobiles, medicine, and food industries, amongst others. However, these progressions have come with the cost of a ubiquitous problem of plastic pollution where the useful lifespan of product, a plastic bag for instance, may only be a few minutes, while the actual lifespan can effectively be forever based on the decomposition rate of plastic.
Since the first U.S. plastic recycling facility was opened in 1972 in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, the number of consumers embracing recycling has risen steadily, but little has been accomplished in the line of commercialized innovation. Worse yet, instead of developing a robust infrastructure to cope with plastic waste, the U.S. relied for years on shipping its discarded milk jugs, toothpaste tubes, pill bottles, and more to China where they would mostly end up in remote landfills, not recycled to become new plastic goods. In 2018, China closed its doors to plastic waste, meaning hundreds of shipping containers packed with plastic leaving the U.S. daily destined for China had nowhere to go.
“After 50 years of relative stagnation in the recycling industry, there is a pressing need today to adopt cutting-edge technologies to re-imagine how we approach the plastic life cycle,” said Ofer Vicus, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Aduro Clean Technologies Inc. (CSE:ACT) (OTCQB:ACTHF), in a phone conversation with AllPennyStocks.com.
Vicus isn’t talking about tech that is decades down the road. Technology is becoming available today to transition away from the inefficient pyrolysis recycling methods to economically and environmentally sustainable practices where plastics are chemically broken down into pure feedstock for new plastics or fuels. He is referencing his company’s Hydrochemolytic™ process that deconstructs plastics at the molecular level, as well as others like waste-to-fuel company Cielo Waste Solutions Corp. (TSX-Venture:CMC) (OTCQB:CWSFF) and PureCycle Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:PCT), which holds a global license to commercialize solvent-based purification recycling technology developed by The Procter & Gamble Company (NYSE:PG) for restoring waste polypropylene into ultra-pure resin.
Aduro fortuitously made its discovery for breaking down plastics – including polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene – while conducting research to improve refining of bitumen, a black, viscous form of petroleum. In its work, Aduro discovered new methods for breaking down hydrocarbon molecules without the use of intense pressure, high temperatures or large amounts of hydrogen.
Aduro’s Hydrochemolytic™ involves using cellulose (found in fruits and plants), ethanol (made from corn), and glycerol (found in oils and fats) as chemical agents and water as the medium to facilitate an optimized reaction to chemically recycle plastics. Environmentally friendly, the water used is continually recycled. The process can also convert heavy crude oil and bitumen into lighter oil, as well as transform renewable oils into higher-value fuels or renewable chemicals. With funding and support from Bioindustrial Innovation Canada, Aduro has developed a pre-pilot reactor system to upgrade heavy petroleum into lighter oil.
Aduro is currently designing a new pre-commercial site in Ontario, Canada for recycling polyethylene products, far and away the most common type of plastic used today. The unit will have capacity of 2 metric tons daily, an amount more than adequate to prove the utility and economics to the 12+ organizations worldwide that have expressed interest in Aduro’s tech.