Making recycled plastics the norm - NEDGEX accompanies deal flow and finalizes investment in Veridis

NEDGEX, the venturing unit of NETZSCH, accompanied the deal flow through to the investment in the startup Veridis. At the beginning of a deal flow, various start-ups are analyzed and evaluated in order to identify potential investment opportunities. With regard to NETZSCH Analyzing & Testing, it is particularly exciting for NETZSCH to work with Veridis as their strategic investor. This is because the start-up has set itself the task of establishing a new quality standard on the plastics recycling market with its MADSCAN system.

Dr. Natalie Rudolph, Division Manager Polymere, NETZSCH Analysing & Testing:

“NETZSCH believes in the Veridis team to solve the industry’s problems through the MADSCAN technology. Their attitude will impact the outcome.”

With its secured funding, Veridis will build and run customer pilots in 2024 and 2025. The first markets are the Netherlands and Germany, having two of the most developed and well-connected plastic recycling industries in Europe. Following these pilots, in 2025, the company will roll out its MADSCAN (eco)system across Europe, bringing the vision of a standardized quality control method for EU plastic recycling.

The stakes are high!

30% recycled content in all our plastic packaging EU-wide in 2030, that’s the dot on Veridis horizon according to the? Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (PPWD).

Today, this still hovers around 2% because plastics are not all the same. There are 250+ types of plastics, but these can NOT be recycled together. Flexible food packaging (LDPE) and sturdy shampoo bottles (HDPE) end in the same (plastic)bin but a Snickers wrapper and a bottle cannot be fused into a new bottle. But how do we measure how well we separate these millions of tonnes of yearly plastic waste? Barely, and that’s what Veridis aims to change.

It’s… complicated

Recycling plastic requires many complex steps to go from bin to new product. Knowing exactly what we’re recycling at each step is a challenge and existing control methods are not built to analyse plastics at the EU’s ambitious scales. Major brands have made big commitments and the EU dictates recycled contents minima. So we need to solve this challenge, fast.

Exactly that’s what Veridis set out to do in 2020 when it started the development of MADSCAN. MADSCAN is a thermal analysis technology, meaning that it measures the different ways in which different plastic types melt and crystallize again. Every (sub)type of plastic has a unique thermal ‘fingerprint’ and MADSCAN can accurately measure these fingerprints by tracking these thermal changes when a sample of recycled plastic is heated and cooled again. This allows Veridis to tell recycling companies exactly which types of plastics are in their batches.

Why is Veridis MADSCAN so unique?

With conventional thermal analysis techniques, analyzing large, representative samples is impossible. This is due to the challenge of transferring heat equally through a larger amount of material. Veridis solves this major challenge, being able to already analyze up to 30 grams per sample (a 10.000x sample size increase) today and between 50 and 500(!) grams per sample (a 100.000x sample size increase) with the MADSCAN system soon. This massive leap in scalability enables measuring the composition & quality of large amounts of recycled plastics at a representative scale. This allows recyclers to give better quality guarantees to brand owners to ensure that they can use recycled plastics reliably and effectively in their products to meet their ambitious recycling commitments.

Jeroen Glansdorp, CEO Veridis: “We are incredibly excited to have these great partners on board to help us take our company and our technology into the next phase. Together, we are building the solution to accelerate plastic recycling!”