Environmentally friendly: Ludwigsburg-based start-up Arcus turns waste into plastic

"The goal is that less plastic waste will be burned in the future, producing less CO that is harmful to the climate," Klatte says. "And that the petrochemical industry uses less fossil oil, so less oil has to be extracted from the ground, which is good for the environment."

The 55-year-old explains how the system works that his company uses to close carbon loops. It accepts plastic waste (for example, mixed plastics and films such as cheese packaging) that would otherwise go to incineration. At the Arcus plant in Frankfurt-Hoechst, this waste is converted into condensate in a thermal process: The plastic dissolves into gas (technical term: it is pyrolyzed), is then cooled down and condensed - thus becoming condensate. This goes in high quality to petrochemical companies, which in turn use this condensate to produce plastics. To stay with the picture, this is how a shampoo bottle or a cheese package becomes a shampoo bottle or a cheese package or another plastic product again.

For this closed-loop process, Arcus founder Klatte developed the technology together with his colleagues: The Hoechst plant produces, stores and fills the condensate on the 1300-square-meter site. It takes three days to fill a tank with about 26000 liters of condensate. This amount requires about twice the amount of plastic waste, Klatte says. Plans are already underway for a second plant that will be much larger than the first and will be able to process more plastic waste - namely, three tons of waste per hour. The founder does not want to give any details about how expensive the plants are.

"Not destroying waste, but bringing it into the cycle, that also conserves the earth's resources," says Klatte. This procedure could, for example, also prevent "huge amounts of plastic" from continuing to end up in the oceans. The European Union wants the plastic recycling rate to increase, he says: "By 2050, more than 90 percent of plastic waste could be recycled in a circular economy." With the new Arcus process, "you can make a big contribution to that," Klatte said. His start-up is "a link between waste management and petrochemistry," he said.

The condensate that Arcus supplies to the petrochemical industry with its expensive plants must be of high quality, he says. "It is tested and analyzed in external laboratories," says Klatte, "in perspective, we want to do it ourselves." To "meet all the requirements," the company works with the Institute for Technical Chemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Arcus is financed by a bank and the group of shareholders, which also includes the Sülzle Group in Rosenfeld (Zollernalbkreis). The money is used to pay employees and plant construction. A start-up needs investors before it becomes a company that generates sales.

Arcus is currently in this transition phase: "We are about to start," says Klatte. As soon as the first plant is up and running (it will do so around the clock), the number of employees will grow from the current five to about 20, according to Klatte. Then the first truck will also drive onto the plant: It will be filled with condensate and deliver the first load to the petrochemical company.