Full Circle Recyling
Materra, X’s moonshot for circularity, partnered with Alterra to demonstrate a breakthrough method for transforming plastic waste back into oil
Humans use nearly 300 million metric tons of oil each year to make the plastic materials that comprise so many of our everyday products. Yet more than 100 million tons of that same plastic is dumped into landfills annually, where it will persist beyond our lifetimes.
For decades, the recycling industry has sought ways to close this circle—keeping plastics in circulation rather than throwing them away forever. One of the most promising technologies is thermal liquefaction, or more commonly referred to as pyrolysis, a chemical process that breaks down plastic waste into its molecular components, transforming it back into oil that can be used to create new, virgin-quality plastics.
Pyrolysis has existed for decades, but its use in recycling plastics is still relatively new. And despite its promise, continuous, full-scale demonstration has had limited success—especially using the heterogeneous, contaminated plastic waste streams that consumers generate every day. The quality of this discarded plastic is often too mixed or contaminated for traditional material recovery facilities to recycle successfully. And until now, recyclers have had limited tools to identify the composition of that waste, reducing both the efficiency and accuracy of determining which pieces are suitable for pyrolysis.
That’s where this partnership comes in. By combining Materra’s ability to identify and sort the right plastics with Alterra’s proven, industrial-scale technology, we’ve shown how difficult, landfill-bound waste can be turned into valuable circular oil. Alterra is a pioneer in this space, and has developed a standalone, commercial-scale pyrolysis facility in North America, which has operated nearly 20,000 hours and produced more than 150,000 barrels of oil from discarded plastics. That oil goes back into circulation through petrochemical customers in the U.S. and EU. Alterra’s facility maintains 90%+ uptime and 70%+ conversion rates, demonstrating the promise of molecular recycling.
The Challenges Facing Recycling Today
The most common form of recycling today is mechanical recycling: plastics are sorted, washed, melted, pelletized, and remolded. While useful, this process degrades material quality and limits how many times a product can be recycled. It’s also impossible to achieve 100% recovery without discoloration or performance loss, reducing its value.
Chemical recycling, by contrast, uses chemistry to return plastics to their original molecular building blocks. Pyrolysis, a form of chemical recycling, converts plastics back into oil that can be refined into virgin-quality resins for food-grade packaging and other high-performance applications.
Yet pyrolysis is not alchemy—it requires the right feedstock mix, primarily polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP). Post-consumer waste streams often contain complex mixtures with PET, PVC, paper, or food residue, which make them difficult to recycle efficiently. Waste management facilities haven’t historically had the tools to sort these streams at the necessary precision, limiting pyrolysis’ ability to scale, meaning vast quantities of usable plastics still head to landfills or incinerators.
Sheldon Cotts, a senior engineer at Alterra, with a sample of oil derived from landfill-bound plastics sourced by Materra.
A Breakthrough Partnership with Alterra
Materra’s vision is to turn all of humanity’s trash into treasure, building a world where everything we use keeps its original value forever. Our team is developing novel technology that combines AI, sensors, computer vision, and chemistry to identify exactly what type of plastic a product is made from—so it doesn’t end up wasted in a landfill. Essentially, we unlock the hidden value in waste by identifying materials at the molecular level and routing them to their highest and best recycling pathway.
We’ve partnered with several waste management organizations and materials companies to pilot our tools for mechanical recycling, including a recent collaboration with one of the world’s biggest plastic producers. Through this work, our technology proved it was able to identify the molecular components of films and flexibles, one of the hardest-to-recycle plastic materials.
To test whether our technology could generate viable inputs for pyrolysis, we partnered with Alterra. The Materra system identified and sorted polyethylene- and polypropylene-rich materials from landfill-bound residue streams at our Oregon facility. This feedstock was then transported to Alterra’s Akron plant.
Alterra produced 40,000 pounds of virgin-quality circular oil, 100% derived from Materra’s post-consumer plastic waste that otherwise would have been discarded —proving for the first time that the Materra platform can work for pyrolysis at commercial scale in an industrial environment.
For Alterra, the pilot was more than a one-off success. The collaboration also generated new data insights that can be looped back into Alterra’s continuous process, enabling real-time optimization as feedstock composition changes. Together, Materra and Alterra demonstrated how AI-driven feedstock intelligence and industrial-scale pyrolysis can reinforce each other to unlock higher efficiency, reliability, and circularity.
Loading the pyrolysis reactor infeed with 100% landfill-bound plastic that will be turned back into plastics.
Moving Towards a World Without Waste
We’re encouraged by the results of the first phase of this pilot, which signals a new frontier for plastics recycling. And speaking of new frontiers, we recently unveiled our new name: Materra. We chose Materra for our circularity moonshot because it fuses two core elements of our work: Materials and Earth (terra). As we continue to make progress on our mission to keep all the Earth’s materials in circulation, we’re excited to share future milestones under this moniker.
We see ample potential to unlock economic opportunities by identifying the value hidden in our trash—estimates show that recovering even 30 percent of our global waste could generate $1 trillion annually. We hope our work with Alterra demonstrates this potential and brings us closer to our vision of creating a world without waste.
We’re always on the lookout for partners across the materials, plastics, and waste management ecosystem to tackle this systemic challenge with us. If you’re interested in a potential collaboration with Materra, reach out to circularitymoonshot@google.com.