Bringing a new technology to market

After receiving a doctorate in chemistry from Yale University in 2021, Julia Curley took a postdoctoral position in Gregg Beckham’s group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the BOTTLE Consortium.

The Department of Energy (DOE) launched the BOTTLE (Bio-Optimized Technologies to keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment) Consortium to advance its Plastics Innovation Challenge, which was introduced in 2019 to accelerate innovations in energy-efficient plastics recycling technologies. According to DOE, the BOTTLE Consortium, which includes Amazon as a member, is focused on designing plastics and recycling strategies with industry and academia.

“While at NREL, I worked on multiple projects collaborating with industry and academia, all with a focus on developing new and improved recycling technologies for today’s plastic waste,” Curley says. “For one of those projects, I led the development of a low-energy mixed polyester plastic chemical recycling platform. Exciting laboratory results combined with promising economic and environmental analyses of the process at scale motivated me to spin out this technology into a startup company, and EsterCycle was born in August of 2024.”

In the following interview, Curley describes EsterCycle’s technology and journey to commercialization.

Q: Tell me about EsterCycle’s technology and how it works. What are your targeted feedstocks, and what products result from the process?

A: EsterCycle accepts a mixed feedstock of petroleum and biobased polyester plastics, including composite and multilayer materials. They’re combined in one pot with an alcohol solvent, a commercially available catalyst and some heat to selectively break the ester bonds that hold the materials together and generate a mixture of monomers. These monomers are then separated and purified so they can be remade into recycled plastics with properties that match virgin materials. We’re focused on recycling PET [polyethylene terephthalate] and PLA [polylactic acid] from single-use packaging, and we’re making monomers to be used in the production of new polymers.

Q: Where is the company in its journey toward commercialization?

A: EsterCycle is currently operating at the laboratory scale (5 kilograms), and we’re working with industry partners to validate the quality of our recycled products as drop-in ready for existing polymer manufacturing. We plan to raise a preseed round of equity capital at the beginning of 2026 to enable scaling up to a prepilot facility where we can begin selling recycled monomers at a scale of 10 tons per year.

Q: Tell me how you came to work with Amazon and what role the company has had in EsterCycle’s development? Bioplastics development?

A: Amazon funded the initial research and development of EsterCycle’s technology at NREL, and they remain a close collaborator and supporter of the company. Amazon’s sustainability team is dedicated to deploying a circular and sustainable system for plastic packaging. This includes working directly with polymer producers and brands to develop novel bioplastics for their packaging, investing in advanced sortation technologies that use machine learning to recognize the new plastics and continuing to work with EsterCycle to ensure these materials can be recycled sustainably. I believe Amazon’s work will have huge benefits for bioplastic development and growth in the market.