This article is part of a series sharing the stories of startups developing innovative solutions to environmental challenges and how they are pushing their business forward even as the Trump Administration champions fossil fuels and slashes funding for green projects. Read all the stories here.
FutureBio is tackling the problem of plastic pollution head-on by creating what its co-founder describes as a new kind of plastic.
Different from both the petroleum-based and the biodegradable ones now in use, it is not only durable but also bio-renewable and easier to recycle, said Zilong Wang.
“It proposes a different and a novel plastic, which is different from all other kinds of plastic,” he said.
Worldwide, only about 9% of today’s plastic is actually recycled. Most of the rest, millions of tons, goes to landfills or ends up in the environment. Even the plastic that is recycled is sent to landfills or incinerators after one or two cycles because the quality of the material degrades.
The vast majority of plastics are made from petroleum, more than 99%.
“We hope they will replace all kinds or most kinds of the petroleum-based plastic in the market,” he said.
Future Bio is focused on chemical recycling, breaking down the plastic to its original molecules, turning the polymers back into to the monomers it was created from.
A chemical process to turn plastics from polymers to monomers was developed at UC Berkeley in 2022.
“When it’s back to the material, it’s going to be equivalent to the new material we use to produce our plastics,” Wang said. “What we can do is we offer the plastic and we offer a way to recycle it with a very low cost method and the recycling rate is very high.”
“And this is very important to resolve this plastic pollution problem,” he said. Among the materials his team has tried, the most successful has a 96% rate.
The company’s push comes as the spotlight on the harm of traditional plastics is getting bigger.
In September 2024, California’s attorney general sued ExxonMobil, accusing the company of waging a decades-long “campaign of deception” to convince consumers that recycling was a workable way to dispose of plastics. In fact, plastic pollution is so widespread that scientists have found microplastics in snow in Antarctica and in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the world’s oceans in the western Pacific Ocean.
ExxonMobil countersued, accusing the attorney general, Rob Bonta, of a “deliberate smear campaign against ExxonMobil, falsely claiming that ExxonMobil’s effective and innovative advanced recycling technology is a ‘false promise’ and ‘not based on truth.'”
Biodegradable plastics, often made from sugar cane or corn starch and which make up about 1% of the total, will degrade after about three months but normally in an industrial composting facility. They are typically used for straws, plates and other items that do not have to be highly durable.
The challenge is to create a plastic that is durable and green, Wang said.
After five years in a laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and funding from the federal Department of Energy, Future Bio is moving its attempt to real-life industry. The company is the first tenant in UC Berkeley’s Bakar Labs for Energy & Materials.
Angeli Patel, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business, said that venture capital for climate technologies is still available but investors are hesitant, wary about President Donald Trump’s direction on energy and about new regulations.
“It’s a matter of ‘How do you build confidence in private investors to deploy that capital,'” she said.
States like California are doubling down on climate transition goals and California is large enough to have some effect, she said. But the country still needs a large regulatory and political momentum for private capital to be deployed at the scale that would have been expected under a second Biden administration, she said.
Wang is hoping to deliver a product in two to three years. He said his team has some candidates it is working on but declined to be specific though he did disclose it would be a more expensive, durable plastic for furniture or plastic tools or a plastic cover, rather than the already inexpensive plastic bottle.
“We want to change the world,” he said. “We want to change the climate. So we are thinking about a sustainable way to do it.”
With government policies changing, making sure that the plastic is profitable becomes even more important, he said.
“But if we really want to push all these things forward, the profit is most important,” he said. “We hope with a new technology, all the parties involved in this industry, they can make the profit and then people can build the circular economy with a self-motivation.”
