DePoly

In 2018, reports in the mainstream media about plastic pollution reached a crescendo. Dead whales with bellies full of plastic trash appeared on the pages of National Geographic . Scientists voiced concerns about microplastics in our food, water, and air. Images of tropical bays choked with plastic debris offered visceral proof that our waste management systems were failing. Samantha Anderson was a PhD student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), at the time , and she vividly remembers how these reports spurred her and her colleagues to take action. “We just decided that we were going to try and tackle it with chemistry and chemical engineering, because that’s what we knew,” she says. With her EPFL lab mates Christopher Ireland and Bardiya Valizadeh, Anderson developed a process for recycling polyethylene terephthalate (PET) in complex waste streams that most recyclers reject. In 2020, the trio cofounded DePoly to