The dirty secret of plastic recycling is that most of it isn’t. PET is one of the most-used plastics on earth, and current methods can only process a fraction of the waste stream, the clean, clear bottles. Coloured plastic, textile fibres, films: mostly landfill or incinerator, regardless of what the little triangle implies. GR3N, a Swiss company based in Lugano, just raised €15.5 million to go after the part everyone else skips.
The Series B was led by 360 Capital, with new investor VP Textile joining, the textile angle being the tell, since clothing is where the unrecyclable PET problem gets ugliest. The technology is called MADE, for microwave-assisted depolymerisation, and the claim is that it breaks all types of PET waste back down into food-grade monomers that can be recycled again and again without degrading. It also cuts CO₂ emissions by up to 80% versus making virgin PET, which is the number the brand-sustainability teams will quote.
Chemical recycling has a long history of impressive lab demos that never survive contact with an industrial plant. GR3N’s Series B is specifically about building the plant. That’s where these stories usually get interesting, or stop.
The money funds MODUS, GR3N’s first commercial-scale facility, the part that matters, because cleantech is littered with elegant chemistry that never escaped the beaker. Unlike glycolysis or methanolysis, GR3N says MADE has no feedstock limitations, which is the entire commercial argument: a recycler that can take the messy, mixed, coloured waste nobody else wants is a recycler with no competition for its raw material.
The timing is doing GR3N a favour. The EU is steadily tightening recycled-content mandates, and big consumer brands have made sustainability promises they now have to actually source against. When regulation turns “nice to have” into “comply or stop selling here,” the company that can process the hard stuff stops being a science project and starts being infrastructure. Whether GR3N’s microwaves scale as cleanly as its slides do is the only question left, and it’s a multi-million-euro one.