Traceless and the EIC Accelerator: Farm Waste Instead of Plastic

traceless materials wants to replace plastic and bioplastic in products that easily end up in the environment. The Hamburg company, founded in 2020 by Anne Lamp and Johanna Baare, extracts natural polymers from residues of agricultural processing and turns them into granules, films and coatings without chemically modifying them, so the material behaves like plastic in use but composts in nature.

The European Innovation Council granted €2,425,149 towards a two-year, €3.46 million market entry project. Since then the company has raised €36.6 million in equity and debt, won a €5.1 million grant from the German environment ministry and, in May 2026, opened a plant in Hamburg with capacity for about 3,000 tonnes a year. It is a real industrial start. It is also a year after the 2025 date a KfW profile gave for a demonstration plant, and the big plant is still to come.

Where traceless Stands Today

On 13 May 2026 traceless opened its first production facility, in a former industrial bakery in Hamburg-Harburg, with about 4,000 square metres and capacity for around 3,000 tonnes of material a year. The company said the investment exceeded €20 million, including €5,128,401 from the federal environment ministry's Environmental Innovation Programme, and that it employed about 110 people. Packaging Europe and biooekonomie.de covered the plant. Chief executive Anne Lamp called it "the world's first industrial production capacities for thermoplastic natural polymers that can be used directly as plastic substitutes".

Named partners include the packaging group Mondi, the retailer OTTO and the distributor Biesterfeld; a KfW profile in 2025 also listed C&A. Applications named by the company are single-use items, packaging, paper coatings and adhesives. We found no published sales volumes or revenue.

The Technology: Natural Polymers, Not New Plastics

traceless' patent, listed on CORDIS, covers a "process for producing water-resistant films from corn gluten meal". According to the 2021 EIC announcement reported by EU-Startups, the materials use residues that do not compete with food, need no harmful additives, and, being neither chemically modified nor synthetically polymerised, were expected not to fall under the EU's plastics rules. That regulatory point matters: the EU's single-use plastics directive restricts many products made of plastic, including some bioplastics.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

MaEtra ran from January 2022 to December 2023. The CORDIS results page lists three trademark registrations and one patent application, and otherwise "no results available": no report on production, customers or certification. The public record of what the project achieved therefore comes from the company, not the EU.

1. Market entryPartialNamed partners and pilot products; no disclosed sales volumes.
2. Industrial productionDelivered3,000-tonne plant opened in May 2026, after the project.
3. Financing the scale-upDelivered€36.6M Series A and €5.1M ministry grant.
4. Published project resultsNoneCORDIS shows only trademarks and a patent.

What Has Happened Since the Award

The plant opened a year after the date given for a demonstration plant. The KfW profile, published in May 2025, gave 2025 for a demonstration plant and 2028 for an industrial plant with 30 times more capacity. The Hamburg plant opened in May 2026. The profile also quoted the company saying it had underestimated how hard a Series A would be without production revenue.

The Money

The Series A, announced on 25 September 2023, was led by United Bankers' Forest Industry Green Growth Fund and SWEN Capital Partners' Blue Ocean fund, with debt from GLS Bank and Hamburger Sparkasse and existing investors Planet A Ventures, HTGF and b.value, according to traceless and United Bankers. The 2021 EIC announcement spoke of a grant "and equity investment" from the EIC, but the EIC Fund is not named among the Series A investors and we found no record of its investment.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU wants less plastic in single-use products and a larger bio-based industry. traceless offers both: a material from European agricultural residues, made in Germany, that its makers say sits outside plastics regulation. Its partners include a major European packaging group, which is where the volume would come from.

The Verdict

traceless materials has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.