Plastic: a material that has shaped the world. Due to its affordable, pliable, yet durable characteristics, it has opened the door for millions of applications. Although plastic is pivotal with its ability to be shaped and molded for multiple uses, it hasn't reached its full potential. Recycled plastic material only accounts for 9% of materials used in plastic products, yet the market was valued at $593 billion in 2021. What if the 91% of plastic material headed for the waste facility was given a new life and purpose?
I founded a circular economy platform that provides a tangible solution to this long-term problem: SMX.
SMX has created an innovative technological offer consisting of an invisible molecular marker, detector and blockchain platform to track, verify, grade, and sort the materials used in plastic manufacturing. The system can embed and detect key information crucial for recycling and reuse – such as the type of plastics, percentage of recycled content, and how many times this specific material has been recycled (i.e., loop count). Our patented innovative technology looks at polymer and monomer levels, diving deep into the molecular structure and predicting its viability for production and continual reuse. The SMX technology can identify and verify the history of the recycled plastic (i.e., its origin, number of loop counts and type of plastic composition), and create new applications with the material, even creating new material to be used. This works by identifying the molecular composition of each material scanned, which is stored digitally in our system – creating a baseline for value, our innovation for giving materials memory. This will create a market for recycling the plastics we need and use every day.
The market technology has a solid foundation, being utilized by the Israeli government for over a decade before being scaled and adopted for commercial use. With an elite Advisory Board comprised of Board members from several NASDAQ companies and the former Head of the National Cyber Bureau of Israel, SMX possesses strong credentials and a solid reputation backed by over 100 patents filed, at various stages, for specific industrial applications. SMX has the ability to unite the ecosystems of the physical world and the digital world by giving materials memory in the materials themselves.
The sustainability market is growing, but is focused solely on energy, water, and air. Carbon credits and other systems that incentivize investment won't be able to adapt to the new and more complex challenges of this system. There is a limit to the innovation of focusing solely on different energy, yet the applications of plastic materials are endless. Plastic is everywhere, in just about everything we use. A new marketplace is required, one based on the reuse of materials that have been overlooked: a plastic credit market. Adding a plastic credit market to the sustainability economy is a paradigm shift, offering an exceptional investment opportunity.
The plastic credit market is based on a simple system, where the price and footprint of the virgin plastics purchased by the producer are offset by the manufacturer who purchases the recycled plastics at a certain loop count. In order to begin this process, the molecular life cycle of the material must be ascertained, which is difficult. Currently, manufacturers do not have the capability to accurately verify their products’ recycled plastic material origination and percentage of recycled content in a timely way. SMX's technology solves this issue.
But with a plastic credit market, the demand for recycled plastics will increase from manufacturers, who will be able to accurately verify and certify the quality, origination, and composition of the recycled plastics. With more manufacturers implementing our system, the data can be shared in order to recycle their material multiple times in different ways and applications. There will be constant demand for more material, adding more methods for innovation in composition, use, and application. This is an evolving market, one that postpones plastic waste, creating a never-ending supply. With our technology, the metrics for a sustainable, circular economy will be tangible, transparent, and accurate. It will help enable companies in the UK to comply with the new Plastic Packaging Tax.
SMX is revolutionizing the plastic marketplace. Stakeholders with monetary ties to production will be more sustainable and ESG-compliant. Plastics, being verified as being reused and recycled, need to be tracked and digitized. SMX can make this a reality. It’s time to evolve the sustainability economy to yield tangible results that are measurable with investment in plastic credit, or, as we like to think of it, the new gold standard.
