One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. This proverb is the motto that Israeli startup TripleW lives by.
TripleW has developed a way to compost food waste by extracting lactic acid using bacteria and then purifying that into usable plastics, essentially producing high-value biomaterials from food waste, for the circular economy.
According to the UN’s FAO, the global volume of food wastage is estimated at 1.6 billion tons and its carbon footprint is estimated at 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of GHG released into the atmosphere per year.
TripleW’s technology treats abundantly available food waste as a 3rd generation renewable feedstock for the production of pure “polymer grade” lactic acid, a building block of polylactic acid (PLA bioplastic).
“You take food waste, and you take all its ingredients and deconstruct it in the best way to make materials that we use in everyday life. For example, the production of bioplastics that are used in food packaging,” explained co-founder and CEO Tal Shapira.
He continues, “It’s blended into a slurry, like in a traditional process, but the microorganisms are the ones targeting specific carbohydrates in the waste, fermenting those into the product, and then we separate the product from the rest,”
With expertise in the fields of biochemical production and recovery, waste hydrolysis, and microorganism engineering, TripleW provides services to determine the techno-economic feasibility of producing bioplastics from waste streams.
“Bioplastics were produced using sugarcane or corn, which are food crops — and they cost a lot. We can eliminate these costs using food waste. That’s not even a cost because you are getting paid to get rid of waste,” said Amir Oranim, co-founder and COO.
But the circularity doesn’t stop there. The waste from the composting process – lipids and oils – can be burned as biogas to produce renewable electricity.
“The demand comes from two directions,” noted Oranim. “One is from governments that implement policies restricting the use of traditional plastics, and the other is from industry that understands that there’s only one direction for plastics, and that’s bioplastic.”
