Turning Plastic Waste into Cost-Competitive Chemicals with Radical Dot's Alexandre Kremer
Alexandre Kremer is the co-founder and COO of Radical Dot, a Munich-based climate deep tech startup developing a low-temperature catalytic process that transforms mixed plastic waste into cost-competitive chemical building blocks.
Alexandre Kremer is the co-founder and COO of Radical Dot, a Munich-based climate deep tech startup developing a low-temperature catalytic process that transforms mixed plastic waste into cost-competitive chemical building blocks.
What led you to founding Radical Dot?
I'm a chemical engineer by background. I spent all of my career working on plastic as a material. I started working on biodegradable plastics, then moved into strategy supporting leading consumer goods brands frame their packaging and circular strategy. I then moved to Indonesia, where I spent three years building waste management value chains in local rural communities across Java and Bali. That experience gave me the entrepreneurial spark. I saw firsthand how to build something from zero to one.
When I came back to Europe, I started working more closely with the chemical industry and met my co-founder, Andreas. We began iterating on ways to address the plastic waste problem as a solution to decarbonize the chemical industry and while keeping prices competitive.
What does Radical Dot do?
We take unrecyclable plastic waste, the kind you'd find in your recycling bin, and turn it into basic chemicals. Those chemicals can then be used by the chemical industry either to make plastic again in a circular loop or to make any number of other everyday products.
The idea is to replace chemicals that have historically been made from fossil fuels. One of the chemicals we're targeting, for example, is acetic acid. You'll find acetic acid in everyday vinegar, but it's also a major chemical used across the adhesive industry. Today acetic acid is mostly made from natural gas. We want to provide a cost competitive alternative feedstock source for these chemicals.
Less than 10 percent of plastic waste is actually recycled today. Why is that?
There are two main reasons: sorting costs and collection costs. In the global south, the primary problem is collection. Take Indonesia, where I worked for several years. What's missing there are basic, low-tech collection systems. These are rapidly expanding economies that haven't fully developed the waste infrastructure they need.
In the global north, the issue is sorting and recycling. Collecting and sorting waste costs money, and nobody wants to pay that price. When you add up the costs, recycled plastic ends up more expensive than virgin plastic. People want to be good for the environment, but they don't want to pay a premium for it.
The core problem with mechanical recycling, today's primary recycling technology, is that it requires one single plastic type sorted at a time. But what we call "plastic" is actually thousands of different materials with different additives at different concentrations. Even within a single polymer family, the length of the molecular chain can vary, which leads to different properties. Going from a thousand grades to one is what makes sorting so expensive. That's why the PET bottle recycles so easily. There's essentially one grade and the bottle shape makes it simple to sort. For most other plastics, differentiating between grades is extremely complex. In Europe, governments have put in place extended producer responsibility regulations that collect fees from companies putting these materials on the market and redistribute them across the value chain. But this alone hasn't solved the problem.
How does Radical Dot's technology differ from other recycling approaches?
Two things matter here. First, sorting costs. Because our process works with low-quality, mixed feedstock, we avoid the high sorting costs that constrain mechanical recycling. Second, energy costs. Our process is energy neutral, meaning it doesn't require external energy input. That decouples us from energy prices. In the U.S. that's less of an issue, but in Europe it's a significant challenge that has driven many recycling companies into bankruptcy over the past 12 to 24 months.
Those two advantages allow our technology to be cost-competitive, and that's what matters. The plastic industry is a commodity market. If you can't beat incumbent fossil-based technology on price, your technology will not scale.
Can you walk through how the process actually works?
Plastic goes into your bin, gets collected, and goes to a sorting center where different materials like paper, metal, and plastic are separated. We take the mixed plastic output directly from that first sorting center. Our process is a chemical recycling process where we use a catalyst and oxygen from the atmosphere to decompose the different polymer chains into a small number of molecules. We then separate, purify, and sell those molecules back to the chemical industry.
What's interesting is that our process is similar to what nature does with plastic. We use oxygen to break down polymer chains, but instead of doing it over a thousand years, we do it in less than an hour. That means the products we make are biocompatible. Turning plastic waste which is a pollution into a product that can contribute to natural ecosystems.
We don't use proprietary hardware. We use only standardized, off-the-shelf equipment, which also helps de-risk the scaling path toward a commercial plant.
What are the biggest challenges facing hardware startups trying to decarbonize the chemical industry?
When you're building a hardware startup, the biggest issue is financing. The most successful technologies are not necessarily the most efficient. They are the technologies that fit into the existing financial asset classes.
The challenge isn't a lack of money. It's a lack of money allocated to a specific risk profile. You have investors who specialize in infrastructure projects with extremely mature technology, purely focused on cash flow. You have investors focused on startups who are ready to take a lot of risk but expect high and rapid returns. But there's a missing gap in the middle, what people call the valley of death. That gap exists not because these assets are less financeable but because there are no funds structured to measure that specific risk and build a portfolio around it.
This is true not just for chemicals. It's the same for cement and metals. We're seeing more startups in all of these fields, and they all face the same issue. There are initiatives out there to address this issue but they remain the exception not the rule.
If Radical Dot succeeds, how does the world look different in 10 to 20 years?
Three things. First, we will have a cost-competitive technology to recycle plastic waste. People will start seeing the value of not sending waste to incineration and landfill, which will remove a significant burden from cities. The cost of incineration and landfill is essentially our tax dollars right now, so freeing up that budget for other priorities while also removing an environmental concern is meaningful.
Second, we will have a fundamentally new chemical industry based on waste feedstock rather than fossil feedstock. The chemical industry today is a byproduct industry of the fuel industry. It's hard to imagine because it's a 300-million-ton industry, but it only exists because people were trying to valorize a byproduct of fuel production. Once we shift away from that model, we might develop completely different chemicals for completely different applications, which will have a huge impact on what materials we use in our daily lives.
Third, emissions. By using waste as feedstock, we save enormous amounts of carbon. The chemical industry produces over 2 gigatons of emissions per year. Most of that comes from Scope 3 emissions. If you replace fossil feedstock with waste, you might be able to eliminate half a gigaton to a full gigaton of emissions. That's not insignificant given the goals we've set for global society.
How do you define deep tech?
Deep tech is the development of technology that relies heavily on strong patents and for which the technology plays an essential role in the business model of the company.
Photo credit: Sebastian Ardt
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