Putting hope in a heap of trash
KIBBUTZ ZEELIM, Israel — Hawks, vultures and storks circle overhead as Christopher Sveen points at the heap of refuse rotting in the desert heat. “This is the mine of the future,” he beams.
Sveen is chief sustainability officer at UBQ, an Israeli company that has patented a process to convert household trash, diverting waste from landfills into reusable bio-based plastic.
After five years of development, the company is bringing its operations online, with hopes of revolutionizing waste management and being a driver to make landfills obsolete. It remains to be seen, however, if the technology works and is commercially viable.
UBQ operates a pilot plant and research facility on the edge of southern Israel’s Negev Desert, where it has developed its production line.
“We take something that is not only not useful, but that creates a lot of damage to our planet, and we’re able to turn it into the things we use every day,” said Albert Douer, UBQ’s executive chairman.
He said UBQ’s material can be used as a substitute for conventional petrochemical plastics and wood, reducing oil consumption and deforestation.
UBQ has raised $30 million from private investors, including Douer, also chief executive of Ajover Darnel Group, an international plastics conglomerate.
Leading experts and scientists serve on its advisory board, including Nobel Prize chemist Roger Kornberg, Hebrew University biochemist Oded Shoseyov, author and entrepreneur John Elkington and Connie Hedegaard, a former European Commissioner for Climate Action.
The small plant can process one ton of municipal waste per hour, a relatively small amount that would not meet the needs of even a midsize city.
But UBQ says that given the modularity, it can be quickly expanded.
On a recent day, UBQ Chief Executive Tato Bigio stood alongside bales of sorted trash hauled in from a landfill.
He said recyclable items like glass, metals and minerals are extracted and sent for further recycling, while the “banana peels, the chicken bones and the hamburger, the dirty plastics, the dirty cartons, the dirty papers” — are dried and milled into a powder.
The steely gray powder then enters a reaction chamber, where it is broken down and reconstituted as a bio-based plastic-like composite material. UBQ says its closely guarded patented process produces no greenhouse gas emissions or residual waste byproducts, and uses little energy and no water.
For every ton of material produced, UBQ says it prevents between three and 30 tons of CO2 from being created by keeping waste out of landfills.
UBQ says its material can be used as an additive to conventional plastics. It says 10 percent to 15 percent is enough to make a plastic carbon-neutral by offsetting the generation of methane and carbon dioxide in landfills.
It can be molded into bricks, beams, planters, cans, and construction materials.
Unlike most plastics, UBQ says its material doesn’t degrade when it’s recycled.
The company says converting waste into marketable products is profitable, and likely to succeed in the long run without government subsidies.
But the wonder plastic isn’t without its skeptics.
Duane Priddy, chief executive of the Plastic Expert Group, said UBQ’s claims were “too good to be true” and likened it to alchemy.
“Chemists have been trying to convert lead to gold for centuries, without success,” Priddy, a former principal scientist at Dow Chemical, said in an email. “Likewise, chemists have been trying to convert garbage to plastic for several decades.”
UBQ said it is confident its technology will prove the skeptics wrong.
“We understand that’s people’s perceptions. We hope to convince them in a professional and scientific manner,” Sveen said.