July 10, 2026 14:43

Swiss company DePoly recently inaugurated a new demonstration plant in Monthey, Switzerland, for the chemical recycling of PET packaging and polyester textiles. The facility has a nominal processing capacity of around 500 tonnes per year.

Located at CIMO’s industrial park in Monthey, the new unit will be used to further optimise the process, qualify materials with customers and collect data ahead of the construction of a 50,000-tonne-per-year industrial-scale plant. The location of the new facility is expected to be announced in the first half of 2027.

The process uses light-activated chemical depolymerisation to recover the waste material’s original monomers: purified terephthalic acid (PTA) and monoethylene glycol (MEG). These can then be reused to produce new polyester.
According to the company, the depolymerisation process takes less than 60 minutes and requires neither high temperatures nor additional pressure.

The technology can also process waste streams that are difficult to handle through mechanical recycling, including food packaging, multilayer films, coloured or contaminated materials and textile waste.

DePoly was founded in 2020 as a spin-off from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) by Samantha Anderson, Chris Ireland and Bardiya Valizadeh. The company is based in Sion, in the canton of Valais, and employs around 30 people. According to DePoly, the opening of the new demonstration plant has created 12 direct jobs and more than 30 indirect jobs.

© Polimerica -  Reproduction prohibited, all rights reserved