TripleW has developed an innovative idea to compost biological material. In this case, food waste.
Israeli startup TripleW takes the phrase “trash to treasure” incredibly literally. We use food waste to produce biomaterials.
“You take food waste, take all of its components, and break it down in the best possible way to make materials that we use in our daily lives. For example, the production of bioplastics used in food packaging. explains co-founder Tal Shapira, who is also CEO of the company.
The material in question is a plastic known as PLA, which is biodegradable and made from food, but has historically been expensive to produce.
“Bioplastics were produced using food crops such as sugar cane and corn, but they cost a lot. These costs can be reduced by using food waste. It’s not a cost because you’re getting paid to get rid of it,” said Amir Oranim, who co-founded Shapira and TripleW and is the company’s COO.
TripleW has developed a method of composting biological material, in this case food waste, by using bacteria to extract a biological compound known as lactic acid and refining it into usable plastic. Developed.
This is an innovative idea that makes recycling more viable. Traditional recycling requires the raw material to be separated and then processed for reuse, which is much more expensive than simply dumping it elsewhere. But in this biological process, it’s all done by bacteria.
“Although blended into a slurry like in traditional processes, the microbes target specific carbohydrates in the waste, ferment them into products, and then separate the products from the rest.” said Shapira.
Nor is it just an economical solution. The waste from this process is a valuable product as leftovers such as lipids and oils can be burned as biogas to generate renewable electricity.
This means that this waste management could soon meet a very important market need.
“Demand is coming from two directions,” said Oranim. “One is from governments implementing policies to limit the use of conventional plastics, and the other is from the understanding that there is only one direction for plastics and that is bioplastics. It’s from an industry where
In Europe, TripleW is an industrial scale company, not out of a laboratory. Its Belgian facility processes countless wastes and produces refined plastics that can be used in all kinds of products that the market demands.
