Novoloop.

A material company that starts where recycling gives up

In a lab outside San Francisco, a pile of crushed grocery film and food packaging - the kind of plastic that every municipal recycling program quietly sends to landfill - is being taken apart at the molecular level. What comes out the other side is not a downgraded gray pellet. It is virgin-quality polyurethane, the same high-performance stuff brands pay top dollar for. That is Novoloop's entire reason to exist, compressed into a single bench.

Today Novoloop is a B2B materials company with customers in footwear and electronics, a demonstration plant running in India, manufacturing partners in China, and a $21 million Series B in the bank. It sells two things that rarely share a sentence: sustainability and performance. Most companies promise one and apologize for the other.

Polyethylene is everywhere, and almost none of it comes back

Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. Polyethylene - bags, films, wraps, mailers - makes up roughly a third of all plastic produced. It is also one of the hardest plastics to recycle. Mechanical recycling chokes on thin, dirty film, so the overwhelming majority of it is burned or buried. The market politely calls this category "hard-to-recycle." Novoloop calls it feedstock.

The founders saw it early and up close. On a high-school field trip to a waste transfer station, Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao watched mountains of plastic head for the landfill and asked the obvious, inconvenient question: why is something this valuable being thrown away?

Two childhood friends, one river, and a decade of patience

Wang and Yao have been friends since high school. Their first scientific lead was almost romantic: bacteria living in British Columbia's Fraser River that could break down a component of plastic. Wang presented the early research at TED while still a teenager. The company that became Novoloop launched in 2015 under the name BioCellection.

The bet was not that plastic could be broken down - anyone can burn a bag. The bet was that you could break it down precisely, cheaply, and at industrial scale, then rebuild it into something worth more than what you started with. That is a chemistry problem, a manufacturing problem, and a capital problem stacked on top of each other. They spent close to a decade on it.

The division of labor tells you something about the company. Wang runs the outward-facing engine - partnerships, fundraising, press. Yao is the first-named inventor on every single one of Novoloop's patents and runs operations. One sells the future; the other builds it.

ATOD: a four-letter answer to a global mess

The engine has an unglamorous name - Accelerated Thermal Oxidative Decomposition, or ATOD - and a fairly elegant job. It breaks polyethylene film down into monomers, purifies them, and synthesizes virgin-quality polyols. Those polyols become thermoplastic polyurethane: durable, flexible, the material in shoe soles, phone cases, and car parts. The whole loop runs at a roughly 68% lower carbon footprint than the fossil-based route.

The word that matters most in that list is "drop-in." Novoloop's materials are designed to slot into existing supply chains without forcing a factory to rebuild itself. A manufacturer swaps in a lower-carbon resin and keeps its machines. The sustainability story arrives without the usual invoice for new equipment.

The receipts: a sneaker, a plant, and a carbon number

Ideas in climate tech are cheap; shipped products are not. Novoloop's most public proof point wears laces. In 2022 the Swiss brand On launched the Cloudprime, built with what it called the world's first chemically upcycled TPU outsole. A material born in waste film ended up on a premium running shoe - the kind of customer that does not accept "good enough for recycled."

Behind the showcase sits the harder evidence: a demonstration plant running continuously in India, manufacturing partners in China, 50 patents across 18 regions, and TIME's nod in 2025. Capital followed. Taranis, an asset manager focused on decarbonizing heavy industry, led the Series B.

An infinite loop, named on purpose

The name is the thesis. Novo for new, loop for circular - a material that never has to end. The stated mission is a waste-free world; the practical version is polymer-to-polymer circularity, where a plastic can be rebuilt into the same grade of plastic, again and again, instead of sliding one rung down the ladder each cycle until it becomes a park bench and then trash.

It is a deliberately large ambition for a company of around 25 people. But materials is a leverage game. You do not need to be big; you need your molecule inside everyone else's product. Novoloop's strategy - drop-in resins, manufacturing partnerships rather than building every plant itself - is built for exactly that kind of leverage.

Back to the bench

Return to that pile of crushed film from the opening - the grocery bags and food wrap that recycling gave up on. A decade ago, two friends looked at a heap exactly like it and refused to accept the ending. Today that same heap has a price, a process, and a destination: a polyol, a polyurethane, a shoe, a phone case, a car part.

The plastic problem will not be solved by guilt or by better sorting bins. It gets solved when waste becomes worth more as a raw material than as garbage - when the economics flip. Novoloop is a bet that chemistry can flip them. The room outside San Francisco is still small. The pile it is working through is not.