Advanced Recycling / Rohnert Park, California
Resynergi.
The plastic-to-oil company trying to make landfills boring.
The wordmark of a company that wants to delete the word "waste" - one microwave at a time.
The plastic-to-oil company trying to make landfills boring.
The wordmark of a company that wants to delete the word "waste" - one microwave at a time.
Somewhere in Sonoma County, a steel box about the size of a shipping container is heating plastic with microwaves. No flames. No smokestack the size of a small town. Inside, the polymers that were once a milk jug, a yogurt lid, a styrofoam tray are breaking apart into a thin amber liquid that looks, smells, and behaves a lot like crude oil. That liquid has a name, PyOil, and Resynergi thinks it is the most interesting thing happening to your garbage.
Resynergi is an advanced-recycling company. Not the blue-bin kind - the molecular kind. It builds modular units that take the plastics most recyclers quietly refuse and converts them back into the raw material plastics are made from. The pitch is almost suspiciously simple: put the recycler where the waste is, run it fast, and stop pretending a landfill is a solution.
Most recycling moves trash to a faraway plant. Resynergi moves the plant to the trash.The whole bet, in one sentence
The world makes plastic by the hundreds of millions of tons. It recycles almost none of it. The number everyone repeats - 9% - is the polite version, because much of what gets collected is downcycled once and then thrown away anyway. The rest is buried, burned, or shipped to oceans it never agreed to join.
The reason is boring, which is exactly why it has lasted. Mechanical recycling - melt and remold - only works on clean, sorted, high-grade plastic. The films, the multilayer packaging, the foam, the grubby #5 tub: too mixed, too dirty, too cheap to bother. Conventional chemical recycling can handle them, but the plants are enormous, expensive, and slow, which means the waste has to travel hundreds of miles to reach one. Transport eats the economics and the carbon savings alike.
The plastic problem was never that we couldn't recycle the hard stuff. It was that doing so cost more than throwing it away.The tension Resynergi exists inside
So here is the trap. The plastic that pollutes most is the plastic that pays least to recover. Solve the chemistry and you still lose on the logistics. That is the knot Resynergi set out to cut - not by inventing a bigger plant, but a smaller, faster, mobile one.
In 2015, Brian Bauer and Jason Tanne started Resynergi. On paper it was an odd pairing. Bauer was a Stanford graduate who had spent his career in telecom and semiconductors - a man who once grew a chip business unit by 300% in five years and had no obvious reason to care about yogurt lids. Tanne had been an early distributor of plastic-to-oil systems and knew exactly how unglamorous the field could be.
Their bet was on a heating method nobody else was taking seriously at scale: microwaves. Instead of warming plastic from the outside in, like an oven, microwave energy excites the material throughout, all at once. Heat faster, and you can build something continuous and compact instead of a giant batch reactor. In 2017 they teamed up with Dr. Roger Ruan at the University of Minnesota to turn the idea into a process. It was, by all accounts, a long maybe.
The interesting companies are usually the ones working on a problem everyone else found too tedious to finish.On why microwave pyrolysis stayed a niche
By 2020 the maybe had a pilot. Resynergi launched its first program and lined up partners that gave the project credibility it could not buy: the Alliance to End Plastic Waste and the accelerator Plug and Play. The chemistry, it turned out, worked. The question that remained was whether anyone would pay for it.
The technology has an industrial-strength name: Continuous Microwave Assisted Pyrolysis, or CMAP. Pyrolysis means heating plastic in the absence of oxygen so it decomposes rather than burns. The "continuous" and "microwave" parts are the trick - they let the reaction run nonstop and fast, which is how Resynergi claims a rate roughly twenty times quicker than the slow, batch-style pyrolysis the industry grew up on.
Out the other end comes PyOil, a liquid hydrocarbon designed as a drop-in replacement for crude oil. That word - drop-in - is doing a lot of work. It means refiners and petrochemical makers do not have to rebuild anything to use it; PyOil slots into equipment that already exists. Resynergi says the result carries a 68% lower carbon footprint than virgin crude. The plastics it accepts are the awkward ones: #2 HDPE, #4 LDPE, #5 PP, and #6 PS - most of what falls out of the average recycling stream.
Microwave-driven pyrolysis that runs continuously, breaking plastic into hydrocarbons far faster than conventional methods.
The amber output - a drop-in crude substitute claimed to cut carbon footprint by 68% versus virgin oil.
A factory-built unit (~5 tons/day) you deploy on-site, manufactured and warranted by Lummus Technology.
The AMP module: imagine a recycling plant that arrives on a flatbed instead of taking three years and a county permit.
If the plant is small enough to ship, the waste no longer has to travel. That is the whole magic trick.On modular, decentralized recycling
A clever process is a hypothesis. Capital from people who understand the industry is closer to a verdict. Resynergi's backers are not generalist tech investors chasing a green headline - they are the petrochemical establishment.
Lummus Technology, a company with more than a century in petrochemical engineering, did not just write a check. It manufactures and warrants the Resynergi modules, which means a firm that has spent 100 years building refinery equipment is staking its name on these boxes working. In 2024, Lummus and Transitions First co-led a $6.4M Series B. Then in February 2025, Taranis - the investment arm of the energy group Perenco - led an $18M extension to switch on the first commercial-scale site. Total raised now sits north of $31M.
Bars scaled to the largest single round. Source: company announcements, 2024-2025.
When the people who built the old oil economy fund your way out of it, that is worth a second look.On who is writing the checks
The board reads the same way: Marianne Abib-Pech, former Global CFO of Shell Aviation; Ilya Aranovich of Lummus; and Katherine Corrigan of Taranis Carbon Ventures. These are people who can tell a real barrel from a press release.
Resynergi states its goal plainly: accelerate plastic circularity to protect human health and the environment. Strip the corporate cadence and it means something concrete - keep plastic in use, recycled near where it is discarded, instead of letting it become someone else's problem downstream or downwind.
Circularity is an easy word to say and a hard system to build. It requires the chemistry, the machine, the economics, and the partners all to line up at once. Resynergi's wager is that doing it on-site and at speed is what finally makes the math work - that the reason the loop never closed was distance and time, not desire.
We're committed to turn on the first of many commercial sites while enhancing the value chain we've created to divert plastic from our landfills and oceans.Brian Bauer, Co-Founder & CEO
Return to that steel box heating plastic with microwaves. A decade ago it was a hypothesis shared between two unlikely founders and a professor in Minnesota. Today it has a name, a manufacturer with a century of pedigree, a board that has run global oil supply chains, and $31M betting it scales. The plastic going in is still a yogurt lid and a styrofoam tray. What comes out is a barrel of something refiners can actually use.
Nothing here is guaranteed. Advanced recycling is a crowded, scrutinized field, and a first commercial site is not a fleet. But Resynergi has done the unglamorous part - it took a problem everyone found too tedious to finish and built a machine small enough to put the answer where the trash is. If it works, the most radical thing about Resynergi will be how ordinary it looks: a box on a truck, quietly making landfills boring.
The future of recycling might not look like a revolution. It might look like a shipping container that showed up and got to work.The closing image