Stewardship Ontario, the organization responsible for processing and finding markets for materials collected in Ontario’s blue boxes, has opened a new front in its efforts to improve recycling. It will invest in companies developing technologies that can help increase recycling and lower costs.
Its first announced investment is in Switchable Solutions Inc., a Queen’s University spinoff that has developed a solvent that can efficiently clean up used polystyrene – think foam coffee cups – and plastic bottles contaminated with stubborn materials such as motor oil.
Stewardship Ontario has previously given a few grants and loans to companies doing promising work in recycling tech. The organization handed out this money from a Plastics Market Development Fund – funded by levies on businesses that package products in plastic – in the hope of improving Ontario’s recycling process and to see if such businesses could be commercially viable, says Lyle Clarke, Stewardship Ontario’s vice-president of innovation and blue box.
“We concluded from that activity that commercial recycling can be very viable in Ontario,” Mr. Clarke says.
So Stewardship Ontario decided this year to move on to a new phase. It won’t give money away, but it will invest in companies through such means as equity stakes, convertible debentures or commercial loans. In short, Stewardship Ontario is becoming a kind of angel investor for entrepreneurs with promising recycling technologies.
Like its previous grants and loans, Stewardship Ontario’s first investments under the new strategy are coming from its Plastics Market Development Fund, set up as a four-year program with about $11-million and now in its third year, Mr. Clarke says. The initial focus is on plastics, though the organization also has smaller paper and glass development funds. Its board will look at future sources of investment funding, he says.
In the spring, the organization put out a call for expressions of interest. It got about 60 responses, Mr. Clarke says, and a newly formed committee of Stewardship Ontario’s board is working through those.
The goal is to support new technologies that help Stewardship Ontario meet its waste diversion targets cost-effectively, says Ian Anderson, chair of the investment committee and president of CKF Inc., a pulp and foam products producer in Toronto. That could include making it easier to recover hard-to-recycle materials, creating new uses for materials or making sorting and processing recyclables more efficient.
Switchable Solutions is a good example. The company was set up to commercialize solvent technology discovered by Dr. Philip Jessop, Canada research chair in green chemistry at Queen’s University. This solvent can be switched between two states. In one, it will combine with contaminants such as oil, thus removing them from recyclable plastic. In the other, it will separate from the contaminants, so the solvent and sometimes the contaminants can be reused.
Unlike conventional solvents, Switchable’s product does the job at more or less normal temperature and air pressure, says Mark Badger, the company’s president and chief executive. Other solvents can remove contaminants from plastic, but only at high cost because they require heat or pressure to work – so they aren’t economical for cleaning up recycled plastic, Mr. Badger says. Instead, recyclers have relied on mechanical processes, but they can’t get the plastics nearly as clean.
An added benefit of Switchable’s process, Mr. Badger adds, is that when used to remove oil from plastic bottles it can recover the oil for recycling. An “empty” motor oil bottle still has more than an ounce of oil stuck to its inside, he says, and there is money in recovering it.
Stewardship Ontario, which has taken a minority stake in Switchable Solutions, also has connections with major recyclers all over the world that will be important to Switchable as it grows, Mr. Badger says.
