Polyethylene is everywhere: in cling films and bubblewrap, drinks bottles, packaging, toys, and even construction materials. More than 150 million tonnes of the stuff are produced globally every year, making it perhaps the most ubiquitous plastic in the world. How much of that ends up being recycled depends on where you live—but the answer is almost certainly “not enough”. As with most plastics, recycling polyethylene effectively is hard, and it’s even harder to turn a profit. Globally, it’s estimated that only 9 percent of plastic is recycled, according to the OECD.
Miranda Wang is trying to change that. In 2015, she and her cofounder Jeanny Yao launched Novoloop, a Silicon Valley-based company that uses a novel chemical process to transform polyethylene waste into polyols—the building blocks of specialty plastics—for use in high-performance materials. Wang and Yao grew up in Canada and met in high school; there, a school trip to a waste management plant inspired them to work on using bacteria to break down plastic waste. When that didn’t scale, they went to university, where they eventually developed the technique now known as Accelerated Thermal Oxidative Decomposition (ATOD). “Our company’s main technology is ‘LifeCycling’, which is a chemical recycling process that breaks down polyethylene, the most common packaging material,” explains Wang. “And then we convert it into polyurethane materials, which can be used in synthetic leathers, in shoes, in cars—durable performance goods.” The process became the basis for Novoloop. In 2019, the company won a Rolex Award and has gone on to demonstrate its technology through collaborations with the likes of sportswear firm On, for its Cloudprime sneaker.
Fast forward to 2025, and after years of research and development, Novoloop has launched its first pilot-scale demonstration facility in India, thanks to the support of the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, and earlier this year it announced a $21 million investment round to help scale the LifeCycled™ process and roll it out at scale. “We’ve brought our technology to the industrial demonstration scale, and what we’re doing right now is preparing everything to build our first commercial facility,” Wang says. Over the past year, Wang has been visiting potential sites, and when we speak in late summer, has narrowed it down to two.
It’s a crucial decision—Novoloop relies on waste feedstocks, so the company needs a reliable supply of clean, processed, recycled polyethylene. But also, most of their intended customers are manufacturers, many of which will be based in Asia. “Then we have to consider all of the tariffs, supply chain costs, transportation, duties,” Wang says. “So, there's been a lot of learning over the past year.”
This is the crucial stage for any scale up—the moment a transformative technology is poised to go from demonstration to making a material difference. It’s a tricky process. “The scale up of a new industrial technology is considered riskier than things that have already been done on copy-and-paste,” Wang says. “So, there’s a delicate balancing act.”
The signs, however, are good. “On our TPU [plastics], for example, we have an independent third-party lifecycle assessment that has been ISO certified that was able to find a 41 percent CO2 equivalent reduction in our TPU compared to the same material derived from virgin fossil fuel,” Wangs says. “And then on the polyol, the numbers are even higher—in the in the 50 to 60 percent range.” That represents a significant carbon saving against potential competitors.
And the nice thing about polyurethanes is that they’re almost as ubiquitous as polyethylene. “They’re used in applications ranging from making sheets and films—inflatable lifejackets all the way to tapes and adhesives that you would use on Lululemon apparel, to injection-molded shoe soles, for example,” she explains. “Or they can even be foamed up with nitrogen gas to be used in other parts of the shoes, like the cushions. TPU is really versatile, because you can melt it, you can spin it, you can extrude it into sheets, you can over-mold it onto existing parts.” Vegan leathers, for example, are often polyurethane-based. “There’s something in the range of 30kg of polyurethane just in the seats of a car,” she says. “So, it’s a really large volume of things that we touch every day, and these are materials that last a long time.”
While Novoloop is attempting to scale its LifeCycled™ process, the company is already making headway against the plastics crisis by building an ecosystem to then make the polyurethanes recyclable again, by working with existing TPU manufacturers to recycle factory scrap. “We also have a side-business—a smaller part of our business, that is already profitable, called Recycled+™,” she explains. “These customers don’t really know what to do with the scrap after they produce it at the factory level, and so we have been able to provide compounded products that allow people to use this material as opposed to dumping it.” Recycling TPU, she says, is rapidly growing, and “harmonious with our overall mission, in working to build a circular economy.”
Throughout its journey, Novoloop has been supported by Rolex, through its Perpetual Planet Initiative, which seeks to support individuals and organizations making a material difference to the planet and human wellbeing. “From the very beginning, the reality is the technology is quite radical,” Wang says. “There was no promise that it was going to be profitable, no clarity on how to get there. It took a really long time to do that. And Rolex really understands this, the determination and commitment we have for creating a real solution. They have been a real supporter and believer in what we do.”
Wang says that Novoloop will soon be sharing exciting news about its pilots and partnerships, even as it prepares to build its first full-scale facility. It’s a fraught time for the company—but also a hugely promising one. “Oftentimes it’s challenging to bring a technology that has been invented from scratch, and figure out how you’re going to integrate it into the supply chain,” she says. “So it’s a really interesting stage, full of new challenges every day. But we are making meaningful progress.”
To find out more about Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative, visit rolex.org, and explore our Planet Pioneers partnership page here.
