San Jose’s recycling pilot program with Silicon Valley startup in final phase

SAN JOSE — Jeanny Yao and Miranda Wang met in their high school’s recycling club in Vancouver, Canada. On field trips to collect plastic bottles on beaches and tour waste-processing plants, the two aspiring scientists became disillusioned with the recycling system.

“Growing up as a kid, you believe that if you do your part and you put your things into the right bins … everything is going to get taken care of,” Yao said.

But as the two teenagers watched workers sorting recyclables from the trash, they learned that most of the plastic would end up in a landfill because there wasn’t a market for it.

The two wunderkinder have since co-founded BioCellection, a startup in Menlo Park that seeks to improve plastic recycling. In 2018, the company partnered with the city of San Jose and GreenWaste, which handles all of the city’s trash and recyclables, as part of a project that could one day eliminate a large chunk of San Jose’s plastic waste.

The pilot program is now in the final development phase, with plans to demonstrate the technology to GreenWaste and the public next year. And if BioCellection can successfully scale up its operation, GreenWaste hopes to have BioCellection build a chemical processing facility at one of GreenWaste’s Bay Area sites.

“I think it’s such a waste when materials that are perfectly good to be reused or repurposed end up as pollution,”  said Yao, 25.

After high school, Yao studied biochemistry and environmental sciences at the University of Toronto while Wang attended the University of Pennsylvania to study engineering entrepreneurship and biology. While still in college, the duo took to the TED stage to present an idea to break down plastic using microbes. But when that method later proved infeasible, they turned to chemistry.

The two developed a series of steps that use various chemicals to break down currently unrecyclable plastics. In 2015, Wang and Yao founded BioCellection at the age of 21. The firm turns film plastics, such as plastic bags, into compounds that can be used to make clothing, carpet and other consumer goods.

Two years later the firm began the pilot program with San Jose and GreenWaste. To move toward San Jose’s long-term goal of producing “zero waste,” city officials say, they’re always looking for better ways to boost recycling through incentive programs, educational campaigns and public-private partnerships.

Projects like this one represent the “spirited innovation that’s the heart of Silicon Valley,” said Kerrie Romanow, San Jose city’s chief sustainability officer and director of environmental services.

In San Jose, all residential waste is hauled to a GreenWaste processing plant, regardless of whether it’s in the garbage bin or recycling bin. Everything gets sorted to separate recyclable material from the trash. But many of the recyclables still end up in dumps.

“The current recycling system is broken for plastics,” said Yao, BioCellection’s chief operating officer. The reason is that the process of melting plastic recyclables into pellets or chips degrades the quality of the plastic to the point that it becomes almost worthless, she said.

As a result, less than 10 percent of plastic gets recycled worldwide. But new innovations from companies such as BioCellection’s project are a bright spot in an otherwise bleak picture of recycling.

“Recycling is at a bit of a crossroads,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste, a nonprofit based in Sacramento. “We can grow the recycling industry … or we can sort of give up on recycling.”

The situation became more severe when China last year began rejecting most of the United States’ recyclable materials because of high levels of contamination. As a result, waste management companies are now scrambling to find new markets for paper, plastic and other recyclables.

Plastic bags with food crumbs, soggy newspapers or cardboard, or garbage thrown accidentally into the recycling bin make contamination a vexing problem. As a result, many materials that could be recycled are sent to landfills.

“If markets don’t exist, then there’s no such thing as recycling. There’s just sorting,” said Emily Hanson, director of business development and communications at GreenWaste.

Hard polyethylene plastics — found in water bottles, yogurt cups and PVC pipe — are routinely recycled in San Jose if they are clean. But polyethylene film plastics are not. These are the sandwich bags, cling wrap, garbage and grocery bags, bubble wrap and other shipping packaging that are used once and then discarded.

BioCellection’s technology targets polyethylene plastics, which make up a third of all plastics and are difficult to recycle. The process, developed by Wang and Yao, converts film plastics into valuable chemicals.

At the start of the process, chemists wash the plastic film to remove contaminants and then shred it into strips. They’re fed into a reactor that uses heat, chemicals and motion to break down the plastic film into other chemicals. The chemical brew then undergoes several rounds of stirring, heating, cooling and evaporation to remove impurities. This concentrates the chemicals into an unrefined product that looks golden or rust-colored because of impurities.

That product is then refined into chemical building blocks, which look like white powder and are worth anywhere from $1,600 to $21,000 per metric ton. According to Yao, commercial retailers will be able to purchase the compound and use it as starting material to make products such as perfumes, paint and the soles of shoes.

Right now, BioCellection’s team is adjusting the process to handle plastics that have been contaminated with dirt or food residue. The company is also trying to scale up its lab’s operation.

“The long-term goal is to be able to recycle all of the city of San Jose’s — and other cities’ — polyethylene plastic,” said Wang, the CEO of BioCellection.

In San Jose, GreenWaste sorts 15 bales, or 12,750 liters, of polyethylene plastics in a day — enough to fill 255 household trash cans. Right now, however, BioCellection is recycling on a much smaller scale: about 10 liters per day.

“But that’s how these technologies get off the ground,” GreenWaste’s Hanson said.

Yao is equally hopeful.

“Our world is so advanced,” she said. “But when it comes to plastic recycling it’s so primitive.”