PuriFire Energy Raises £2.7M to Turn Plastic Waste Into Renewable Fuels and Clean Electricity
August 15, 2024
PuriFire Energy, a UK cleantech company, has raised £2.7 million from Bulnes Capital, HICO Investment Group, and R&R Investments to develop and commercialise its plastic-to-energy technology platform. The company uses pyrolysis — the thermal decomposition of organic material in the absence of oxygen — to convert plastic waste that cannot be mechanically recycled into renewable fuels, chemical feedstocks, and electricity, redirecting a material stream that would otherwise end in landfill or incineration into a productive energy and materials cycle.
The plastic waste problem is one of the most visible and intractable environmental challenges of the contemporary economy. Global plastic production has grown continuously for decades, and while public awareness of plastic pollution has increased substantially, the recycling infrastructure needed to handle the diversity and volume of plastic in circulation has not kept pace. Only a minority of plastic types can be efficiently mechanically recycled, and significant volumes of even nominally recyclable plastic end up in landfill or exported to lower-cost processing destinations. The remainder — mixed plastics, contaminated packaging, multilayer films — is typically incinerated for energy recovery at relatively low efficiency, or disposed of in ways that create long-term environmental harm.
Pyrolysis offers a different pathway for this material. By heating plastic waste in a controlled, oxygen-free environment, pyrolysis breaks the polymer chains down into shorter hydrocarbon molecules that can be collected as oil (pyrolysis oil), gas, and char. The pyrolysis oil can be used as a fuel, refined into chemical feedstocks for new plastic production (creating a circular economy pathway), or used as a substitute for fossil fuel inputs in industrial processes. The gas fraction can be burned to generate the heat required to run the pyrolysis process itself, or converted to electricity. PuriFire's technology focuses on optimising this process for energy efficiency and output quality, with a particular emphasis on producing outputs that can displace fossil fuel inputs in applications where low-carbon alternatives command a premium.
The funding will be used to develop and test PuriFire's system at pilot scale, refine the process chemistry, and build the commercial partnerships with waste management companies, industrial users, and fuel distributors needed to bring the technology to market.
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