What happens to plastic waste once it is thrown away?
While companies specializing in recycling exist to transform them into granules, in Europe, only 32.5% of the 29 million tonnes recorded are converted each year.
With a rate of 24.2%, France is even behind.
This is one of the reasons that prompted Edouard Garreau to found the company polytopoly.com in Paris in October 2018, before moving to Loiret, his department of origin.
"Coming from the virgin plastic sector, he wanted to get into the field of recycling, of which he noted the structural deficiencies", situates Marine Charrier, who joined him a year later as operations manager.
If the Orleans company researches, analyzes and sells the material once it has been recycled, it especially wishes to embody the role of facilitator.
How? 'Or' What ?
Thanks to the establishment of a sort of “Amazon of recycled plastic”, a digital platform capable of identifying it, optimizing its recovery and putting it on sale via the polytopoly.com website.
An application and a certification label
“There was a lack of an organized sector.
On the one hand, recyclers are struggling to find a buyer for their transformed material.
On the other hand, plasturgists find it difficult to obtain recycled plastic when they are looking for it, ”explains Marine Charrier.
From three employees in 2019, the young company has grown to fifteen today and is targeting 20 to 30 additional recruitments within a year.
In their sights: specialist engineers capable of analyzing the characteristics of processed plastic offered by the more than 1000 European recyclers identified by polytopoly.com.
“The idea is to eventually be a major player, in France but also internationally, in this developing sector of the circular economy,” she says.
The stake is all the greater since at the start of his mandate, Emmanuel Macron set the objective of 100% plastic reuse by 2025.
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Proof of the enthusiasm for this sector: after a first fundraising of 2 million euros carried out a few months ago, Polytopoly.com will launch a second "of several million euros" in 2021.
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It aims, by the end of the year, a turnover of 8 to 10 million euros.
Enough to continue to grow and bring future projects to fruition, including the implementation of an application to better organize the recovery of plastic waste.
If the materials are analyzed and tested in its laboratory, the company also intends to deploy a certification label which would mention in particular the percentage of recycled plastic of all products on sale.
