Saving a Caribbean ‘sea of plastic’
A colossal “sea of plastic” was discovered last month in the Caribbean, with bunched-up bottles and bags stretching for miles.
It reminded one Israeli environmental entrepreneur of Haifa Bay and the Kishon River – polluted with petrochemicals.
“All the plastic... stays for hundreds of years inside the water,” said Yuval Tamir. “We [have] the only solution for the Caribbean that can process all the organic waste together, and you don’t have to separately sort it.”
As a former naval commando for 20 years, Tamir would regularly dive into the contaminated Kishon River for training. Shortly after being discharged, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Tamir doesn’t know whether prolonged exposure to all of that debris caused his cancer, but he battled the disease by founding InfiMer Technologies, which seeks to recycle plastic from household waste.
More than 400 million tons of plastic are produced annually worldwide – from plastic forks and spoons to water bottles and plastic bags – of which only 9% is recycled, according to a recent paper in Science Magazine. Another 12% is incinerated and 79% accumulates in landfills. Plastic is polluting the world – damaging commercial fishing, health and the environment in general – and it costs around $40 billion annually, according to a conservative estimate from the United Nations Environment Program.
With the amount of plastic produced expected to double in the next two decades – its large-scale production and use only dates back to the 1950s – InfiMer has devised a patented technique to more efficiently recycle plastic into raw marketable materials which can be used by manufacturers. Unlike most recyclers worldwide which rely on public subsidies, the company’s money-making factory removes minerals such as glass, sand and stone from garbage, turning the remaining organic waste into new thermoplastic material.
Based in Kibbutz Barkai, some 60 km. north of Tel Aviv east of Hadera, InfiMer Technologies is manufacturing a recycled composite polymer, also named InfiMer. The composite can serve as raw material for plastic manufacturers, and can be combined with virgin plastic to make high-quality chairs, tables, crates, plumbing pipes and toolboxes – “a huge variety of furniture and infrastructure products, both indoor and outdoor,” said Tamir.
Much of the material used to make plastic – such as polyethylene and polypropylene – is made from fossil fuels, and isn’t biodegradable. One obstacle to recycling is that it is difficult to combine polyethylene and polypropylene, which are normally incompatible, into a strong polymer.
“InfiMer is a composite material that can bind to any kind of polymer – so we can recycle all plastic together. With most recycling, you have to recycle carefully, and you have to separate polyethylene and polypropylene. But for InfiMer, it’s no problem. We can bind it together and we make one composite material,” Tal Tamir, VP of marketing and Yuval’s wife, added.
The company, founded in 2013, began selling commercially in 2015. Its factory can process some 700 kg of municipal waste per hour, producing a half ton (454 kg) of InfiMer. Until the Environment Ministry approves all of its permits, the company will continue to get irregular garbage shipments from Tel Aviv, Caesarea and Haifa.
“We are repeating the process of what happens in nature, over millions of years, in just 15 minutes,” said Tamir, as the organic material becomes a type of fossil fuels.
InfiMer employs 15 people and raised $2.4 million in 2015 when it merged with EZ Energy, now listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange as INFR.