DePoly and the EIC Accelerator: A PET Recycling Plant, a Year Late

Mechanical recycling needs clean, sorted PET, and up to 90% of EU plastic waste goes unrecycled, according to DePoly's EIC project summary. DePoly, a company founded in 2020 out of research at EPFL's campus in Sion, says it can take PET and polyester straight out of mixed, dirty waste and break them back into the two chemicals they were made from: purified terephthalic acid (PTA) and mono-ethylene glycol (MEG). Those are the raw materials of every PET bottle and polyester fibre, so in principle the output can go back into any PET product.

The EIC Accelerator selected DePoly at its October 2025 cut-off, one of 61 companies announced on 17 February 2026, for blended finance. CORDIS records a grant agreement for the project, R-PURE, signed on 28 May 2026, with an EU contribution of €2,499,642.88 from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028. The company's own announcement of the same day gives no amount and no project name, and no figure for the equity part of the award has been published.

What the process does differently

PET is the polyester of drinks bottles, food trays and much synthetic clothing. Mechanical recycling shreds plastic and reprocesses it into lower-quality material, as Tech.eu describes it. The R-PURE objective on CORDIS puts the limit at feedstock of 95% purity, which leaves the mixed post-consumer waste at municipal sites out of reach because sorting it would cost too much.

DePoly's claim, in the same CORDIS summary, is that its reaction is selective and energy-efficient: only the PET in a mixed stream is broken down to PTA and MEG, and the rest of the waste is left untouched, so the waste does not need to be sorted first and can carry dyes, additives and food residue. The summary says the process is 99% efficient. The company's July 2026 plant release, as reported by chemXplore, describes it as light-activated, taking under 60 minutes without high temperature or added pressure. None of these performance figures has been published by an independent party.

The climate case comes in two versions. CORDIS describes the process as 65% more CO2-efficient than producing the plastic from oil. The July 2026 release cites up to 75% lower emissions than virgin PTA, a figure that includes credits for waste that would otherwise have been incinerated. The two are not directly comparable, and both are the company's own claims.

What the EIC is paying for

R-PURE is not a grant for the depolymerisation reaction itself. According to CORDIS, the project "seeks [to] optimise and scale-up PTA and MEG purification and crystallisation processes to enable drop-in capability of monomers into existing PET production processes." That is the step that decides whether a PET producer can feed DePoly's monomers into an existing plant.

When the proposal was written, the objective notes, the process had been tested "extensively (for PET)" at a 50-tonne-a-year pilot plant and a 500-tonne-a-year showcase plant was under construction. The project carries a 100% climate action marker and a 40% clean air marker in CORDIS. DePoly is a Swiss company: Swiss entities can take part in Horizon Europe calls, including the EIC Accelerator, as beneficiaries from 2025, per the Swiss contact point Euresearch and the consultancy Accelopment.

1. Semi-industrial showcase plantOpenedInaugurated in Monthey on 6 and 7 July 2026, per Packaging Europe and chemXplore.
2. Drop-in purity of PTA and MEGToo earlyThe R-PURE objective; no project result is on CORDIS five months into a 24-month grant.
3. Product made from the monomersPrototypesPTI bottles in January 2025 and an Odlo fabric in September 2025, both described by the partners as matching virgin material.
4. Commercial-scale plantNot yet50,000 tonnes a year, site to be announced in the first half of 2027, per the company.

A plant announced for 2025, opened in 2026

DePoly raised a seed round of CHF 12.3 million in June 2023, led by BASF Venture Capital and Wingman Ventures, to build the showcase plant, chemXplore reported at the time; the company's five-year letter of February 2025 lists the same figure. In April 2025 MassMutual Ventures joined, and the company put the seed round at $23 million in total, Tech.eu reported; Packaging Insights added that rounds and grants together came to more than $30 million. Tech.eu gave summer 2025 as the opening date of the 500-tonne plant in Monthey.

The plant was inaugurated on 6 and 7 July 2026, about a year later. Packaging Europe gives a nominal capacity of about 500 tonnes of feedstock a year, 12 direct and more than 30 indirect jobs, and a purpose of qualifying products with customers and collecting operating data for later plants. No source found explains the delay, and DePoly's news page does not address it.

The release also states signed customer volume of CHF 50 million, per chemXplore. No customer, contract length or tonnage behind that figure is public, and it is a company statement, not an audited one.

Bottles and base layers

The public evidence that the monomers can become products comes from two partner trials. In January 2025 DePoly and the packaging developer PTI announced that PTA from mixed PET and polyester waste had been turned into pellets and blown into bottles; PTI's Stéphane Morier said the samples were similar to a control made from virgin PET, and a preliminary screening met migration limits for food contact, Renewable Carbon and chemXplore reported. No quantity was given.

With the outdoor clothing brand Odlo, DePoly took 20 kg of cut-offs from Odlo's base layers in a trial supported by a CHF 24,000 Innosuisse Innovation Booster grant, chemXplore reported in October 2024. In September 2025 the partners said the result was a recycled polyester fabric of virgin quality, made across four countries; they published no test data. Both trials are proofs of concept, not supply contracts.

What the register shows

DePoly SA is listed as active in the Swiss commercial register, with its seat in Sion, per the Valais register excerpt and Moneyhouse. The register does not publish DePoly's accounts, so revenue, losses and staff cannot be checked there. What the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce does publish is each capital increase: the number of shares rose from 10 million at registration in February 2020 to 29.6 million in September 2026.

The largest step came on 24 April 2026, when the share count rose from 19.55 million to 29.24 million. The gazette notice of 7 May 2026 records that 5,719,246 of the new shares were issued against claims totalling CHF 8,750,446.38; the notice does not say what the claims were. The same notice records two directors leaving the board and one joining. In March 2026 co-founder Christopher Ireland left the board and the auditor changed from Copartner Revision to BDO; in September 2026 Mary McCarthy became board chair, with Samantha Anderson remaining a board member, which the company announced as preparation for its next phase of growth.

Why Europe cares about PET monomers

The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, requires single-use plastic drinks bottles and contact-sensitive PET packaging to contain 30% recycled plastic from 2030, rising to 65% for bottles and 50% for other contact-sensitive PET by 2040, per summaries by Projet Celsius and TOMRA. Mechanical recycling needs clean, sorted feedstock, per the R-PURE objective, so a process that turns coloured trays and polyester textiles into monomers fit for food contact would widen the supply of material that counts toward those targets. That is the policy case for funding R-PURE; whether DePoly can supply at a price that competes with virgin PTA is not shown by any public document.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.