UBQ Materials, a Israel based company has discovered a revolutionary process that makes new, raw material out of all Residual Municipal Solid Waste (RMSW) destined for landfills: food waste, soiled cardboard, paper and mixed plastics.
The magic in their process is that they’re are taking everything — the chicken bones, the banana peels and are converting it into a new raw material.
In UBQ, nothing goes to waste. Metals and glass go to recyclers. The best part is there’s no water involved in the process, so it’s really efficient in terms of the environment.
The company has been testing and refining its technology for nearly a decade in an attempt to find a solution to the nearly 2 billion tons of plastic waste created worldwide every year.
UBQ’s proprietary process uses temperatures up to 400º C to break down any organic matter and this results in “a thermoplastic, composite, bio-based, sustainable, climate-positive material” that emerges as long, spaghetti-like strands that are then cooled and cut into round or cylindrical pellets. Those pellets are then colored to meet the requirements of customers.
Recently Swiss environmental consulting firm Quantis evaluated its process and determined that for every ton pellets created by the UBQ process, about 15 tons of carbon dioxide are avoided.
Adding as little as 10% of the material can make the result carbon neutral, depending on the type of plastic being created. The facility in Kibbutz Tze’Elim is capable of producing one ton of UBQ material per hour, which works out to about 7,000 tons annually.
If UBQ is successful in showing the world how to create a truly circular economy, the world will be on its way to conquering the pernicious problem of plastic waste.
Reference- The Washington Post, Clean Technica, UBQ Materials website