Actually a madness: Half of the earth’s crust is tapped in order to extract crude oil, the “black gold”, with enormous effort. Many of the products obtained from this, such as plastic packaging, end up in nowhere, on ordered or wild garbage dumps, in holes in the ground, in garbage incineration plants or even in the sea.
As scientists and environmental activists strongly criticize, the oceans in particular have degenerated into cheap garbage dumps. According to their gloomy prognoses, by half of our century at the latest, more plastic parts than fish will swim around in our oceans if something is not done sustainably.
Christian Schiller, 36, has already experienced this impending apocalypse very directly – on a sailing trip between Colombia and Panama. One day when he relaxed his legs dangling into the water when there was calm, he soon encountered a hard, initially indefinable mass. It quickly became apparent that his yacht was stuck in a dense, hundreds of meters long garbage carpet made of plastic residue – the rudder was caught in this foul-smelling mass.
It was more than three years ago that the incident happened, but the young entrepreneur is still preoccupied with it. “I just don’t want to get into my head that you carelessly throw away something that actually has value,” he says. “This has long been recognized in the case of metals. They are collected and recycled because the increasing scarcity of resources makes more and more money. And it also protects the environment.”
According to surveys by the World Bank, around 240 million tons of plastic waste are created worldwide every year. Volkan Bilici and Christian Schiller founded the company Cirplus in 2019 to bring plastic waste back into the economic cycle.
(Photo: Cirplus)
This is exactly what occurred to him when the yacht was sailing for Panama again. Why not make a business out of recycling used plastics? The need for it is there. According to surveys by the World Bank, around 240 million tons of plastic waste are generated worldwide every year. And not even a fifth of this huge pile of plastic packaging and objects of all kinds is currently being recycled. To do this, more than ten million tons of the plastics end up in one of the world’s oceans. “That’s a truck load,” says Schiller. “In the minute.”
Schiller is only in his mid-thirties. When the French start-up Blablacar started setting up its online car-sharing agency in Germany in April 2013, Schiller became its first German employee. Under his leadership, the French business in Germany was built up and expanded within a few years – with growing success: in 2017, Blablacar already had six million customers in this country. With so much success behind him, Schiller got out to fulfill a long-cherished wish to travel around the world for a year.
Not knowing that this trip through almost 20 countries would bring him a new professional challenge. Finally, when he saw the plastic garbage carpet, he realized the ludicrous fact that although people are able to circumnavigate the earth for months in space, they are unable to transfer the useful plastic material en masse into a meaningful economic circle in everyday life on earth. “Absurd,” he says. “You could solve this man-made problem with a clever regulatory policy for the markets.”
Back in Germany, he began to deal intensively with the problem. First alone, later together with Volkan Bilici. Schiller met the software specialist, who had worked for years as an IT developer in the plastics processing industry, when he applied for the Entrepreneur First program of an English start-up sponsor. Soon they agreed to work together on the recycling business.
Cirplus wants to be a kind of Amazon for recycled plastics
At the beginning of 2019 they founded Cirplus. With the aim of creating the first global internet exchange for plastic material. Under the company name, which is made up of circular (circular) and surplus (added value), the two founders reached the second round of Entrepreneur First. That brought them an initial start-up capital of 80,000 British pounds in 2019. Two years later, more venture capitalists from Sweden and Germany joined them. In addition, Cirplus is supported with state subsidies.
Cirplus currently has 10 employees and around 1000 users are registered on the platform. The number is increasing all the time, not least because the platform is still free of charge. The company is currently still living on investor and subsidy funds. Investors firmly believe in Cirplus.
If the founders have their way, their internet platform will become a kind of Amazon for recycled plastics and plastic waste. “Even more,” says Schiller. “We want to be a professional procurement platform for plastic and all plastic recyclates.”
The diverse composition of plastic waste complicates business.
Looking more closely, Cirplus wants to network disposal companies and recycling companies that produce recycled plastic from the waste and then pass it on to plastic processors who need the supplied raw material for their products, for example shampoo bottles. And they in turn ultimately supply their recycled products to brand manufacturers and other producers. In this way, the plastic would then dissolve as a valuable raw material in a new product and not end up in the sea or in a waste incineration plant.
So much for the theory. And the practice? The devil is in the details. The diverse composition of plastic waste, in particular, complicates business for recyclers. It is extremely difficult for them to provide consistent quality and variety for high-quality applications. That alone usually makes buying new goods much cheaper. “As long as the price of the new goods is 20 to 30 percent below that of the recycled material, which today still often does not match the quality of the new goods, it will be difficult to build up a stable group of buyers,” says Schiller. “Customers don’t buy used goods unless they are sure that the quality is right.”
In addition, the market is highly fragmented and therefore completely opaque. According to conservative estimates, in the European Union (EU) alone there are only around 1,000 recyclers for every 50,000 plastics processors, often small and medium-sized companies with annual capacities of no more than 20,000 tons. “It takes smart investment incentives and funding programs,” believes the Cirplus boss. “And a trading platform like us.”
Many waste producers and disposal companies still do not know what market potential their waste has because they do not know the end customers’ willingness to pay. Recyclers, on the other hand, find it extremely difficult to ensure a continuous flow of quantities of consistent quality for their customers in the fragmented and small-scale market. And that, in some cases, under completely different legal frameworks.
In the EU countries alone there are 27 different legal requirements for the treatment of waste. “That can only be brought under control with a digitized procurement process,” Schiller is certain. “Because that’s where every human brain fails.” With his digital platform Cirplus, he believes he is on the way to becoming a global marketplace for recycled plastics. Not least because, thanks to the digitization of all procurement stages, he is already able to reduce the costs of using recycled material by a quarter.
And the two Cirplus founders can now claim one more success for themselves. Together with industry giants such as the Dual System Deutschland (the yellow bag), the disposal company Remondis or the plant manufacturer Krauss Maffei as well as the German Institute for Standardization, they have initiated the urgently needed new DIN standard for plastic waste. As early as October, it will create dedicated framework standards for the classification of plastic recyclates, for example according to origin, quality or quantity, if as far as possible all market participants recognize and encourage them. For Schiller, however, DIN SPEC 91446 is the “breakthrough” for closing entire plastic cycles. “That will enormously accelerate digitized trade processing,” he says. “That’s exactly what Cirplus is made for.”