Swindon's Recycling Technologies aims for £40M raise on AIM
Recycling Technologies, a company spun out of the University of Warwick in 2012 and now based in Swindon, which announced its intention to float on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange last month, is aiming to raise up to £40 million when it begins trading, which it hopes to do this month.
Recycling Technologies has developed a modular and mass producible machine, the RT7000, which processes hard-to-recycle plastic waste into a synthetic oil that can be sold back to the petrochemicals industry as a chemical feedstock to make new plastics. Its modular, small-scale design enables integration with existing waste management infrastructure, providing a scalable solution to recycle plastic waste anywhere in the world.
The Company’s mission is to make plastic sustainable and to support the critical global drive towards a circular economy. Approximately 368 million tonnes of plastic were produced globally in 2019 , with forecasts suggesting this will reach at least a billion tonnes by 2050 . Only around 12 per cent of the plastic waste arising is currently recycled each year, with the remaining 88 per cent being buried in landfill, burned, or leaked into the environment .
The company plans to mass-produce and sell the RT7000, providing the global waste industry with a new and attractive revenue stream from existing waste plastic that is currently put into landfill or incinerated, often at a significant cost to the waste manager.
Recycling Technologies has secured key industry and financial partners, including Neste,a $40 billion USA-based petrochemicals company, currently ranked 4th most sustainable company globally in 2021, AltheliaSustainableOceansFund(SOF),an impact investor aiming to assist ininstalling RT7000’s in underdeveloped regions to reduce plastic leakage into the world’s oceans and INEOSStyrolution, a global leader in tyrenics–funding and co-developing a polystyrene to styrene process with the company, the first of which will be built in France with a significant investment by INEOS Styrolution.
The first commercial scale RT7000 will be located at Binn Eco Park in Glenfarg, Scotland and Recycling Technologies has identified a strong pipeline of subsequent projects and customers.
The company is also developing a project in Indonesia, supported with funding for a feasibility study from the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, an alliance of more than 60 companies in the plastic value chain.
Adrian Griffiths, CEO of Recycling Technologies, said: "In our quest for a sustainable, low carbon existence, we will need plastic. It is typically a lower carbon alternative than other materials in many applications and so we need to quickly build capacity to recycle it, in a way which emits the least carbon. Recycling Technologies’ technology, built into the RT7000 machine, will be mass produced to provide such recycling capacity. Our innovative team and engineering expertise will provide a step change in the story of plastic; this fundraising is an important step in writing the next chapter. "
