Circularity Moonshot
Turning the world’s waste into our most valuable resource
X’s Moonshot for Circularity is on a mission to radically reduce global waste and move to a true circular economy. The team has developed technology that identifies waste material at the molecular level—starting with plastics. They also work with industry partners to improve the way recycling centers process plastics using AI and robotics. If you are interested in collaborating, please reach out.
Grace Young, Research Engineer, in the circularity moonshot lab
Our Growing Waste Problem
Studies suggest that by 2050, humans will produce 3.8 billion tons of waste per year—a 73 percent increase from 2020. As trash continues to accumulate on our planet at an accelerating rate, it becomes even more difficult to manage.
Mismanagement of waste exacerbates many intersecting environmental issues: Landfills emit potent greenhouse gases, plastics clog our oceans and other vital ecosystems, and microplastics are a growing health concern. The more we throw away, the more we need to produce new materials from scratch.
To tackle our planet’s ballooning waste problem, X’s Moonshot for Circularity team is developing new ways to reuse and recycle the world’s products and materials. Their goal is to make circularity so easy and economical that we don’t generate waste or need to extract raw resources.
Rey Banatao and Janice Leung in the lab
Pioneering with Plastics
The team decided to start with plastics. Since the 1950s, humanity’s use of plastic has grown exponentially—it’s affordable, lightweight, durable, versatile, and used in everything from cars and planes to food packaging.
But the world’s ubiquitous plastic consumption has also become an environmental hazard. Plastics account for 11 percent of the world’s global oil demand, and the world is producing twice as much plastic waste as it was two decades ago.
Our waste management systems — which were initially designed for glass and cardboard — are still trying to catch up to the rapidly evolving use of complex plastic packaging. Modern packaging is made from multiple different plastic polymers and additives. When combined with other materials like paper and metal, traditional waste facilities struggle to identify and route them into proper recycling streams.
Plastic recycling is most successful when the packaging is primarily made up of one molecular component, such as a polymer like polyethylene terephthalate (PET), commonly found in single-use water bottles, or like polyethylene (PE), found in milk jugs. The majority of the rest of the plastic the world produces ends up in landfills or incinerated.
As the team dug into the problem, they discovered a core challenge: a lack of data. To recycle plastics with complex chemical properties, facilities must accurately identify material composition. The waste management industry has minimal information about the quality, quantity, and location of plastic waste. So the team decided to create this dataset themselves.
Waste samples
A First-Of-Its-Kind Catalog
Using a combination of machine learning, AI, and Google’s world-class compute power, the team is building the industry’s first comprehensive database to catalog plastic waste; from packaging and textiles to automotive and electronic waste. They started with their own household garbage, using spectrometers and analytical chemistry to reveal the molecular composition of each package. They then trained machine learning algorithms to properly identify the molecular makeup of every piece of plastic packaging.
Today, the team has millions of data points about the everyday packaging we all use, and is running a pilot project at a recycling plant. There, the team’s technology scans thousands of pieces of plastic packaging every minute, and then instantly identifies their molecular composition, processing the data in real time at high speed.
The team’s unique sensor fusion system can determine the detailed, molecular makeup of household packaging, including black plastics, and they’re training models to identify molecular components in other waste materials. They are also developing new sorting processes to improve the quality of inputs for recycling.
The goal is to create an entirely new system where waste management facilities can identify and sort all materials based on their molecular components: Understanding waste materials at the molecular level could be the key to unlocking recycling and circularity on a much larger scale.
Circularity Today
The team plans to apply their technology to all aspects of the circular economy—including reuse and redesign. By identifying materials at the molecular level and determining whether their quality is still adequate, the team could route them back into the world for reuse, minimizing the need to recycle or remanufacture the materials. And by giving manufacturers more information about certain complex, impossible-to-recycle materials, they could improve how they design products from the start.
Longer term, the ability to identify the molecular components of waste creates opportunities to produce virgin-quality materials and help society move away from extracting petroleum and other resources from the earth.
Project Lead
A materials scientist and serial entrepreneur, Rey has co-founded, commercialized, and scaled numerous companies focused on bio-based and chemically recycled polymers. Rey led the team that created and developed the materials used in the world’s first recyclable wind blade, is an advisor to and investor in several sustainable materials startups, and on several boards.
