Cyclion Energy is partnering with the Sea World Foundation to help its research, rescue and conservation of the marine environment.
A washing machine for mixed organic and plastic waste.
It’s a simple explanation for a complex process of converting plastics and biomass to fuel or electricity. And it has potential to alleviate mounting rubbish and pollution problems in remote areas.
Philip Major, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cyclion Energy, has proof of concept for the patent-pending technology that liquifies and depolymerises waste. In addition, Cyclion is commencing preparations for a large-scale commercial project in the Philippines due to start in 2025. It will process up to 900 tonnes a day of municipal solid waste.
Throughout September and October, Cyclion Energy is launching a crowd-sourced funding campaign via Birchal to facilitate a pilot plant in an Australian university for the beginning of 2024.
As part of the patent pending, IP Australia conducted global patent searches and found no one is doing anything like this process.
“It’s incredibly exciting,” says Philip.
His journey in waste-to-energy (WtE) started in 2014 with a chance conversation that set him on his current path. He says, at the time he thought WtE was too good to be true.
“I did my own research and looked at solutions at that time and identified the problems,” Philip says. “I wanted to know why this wasn’t happening in Australia.”
In 2017 he had a pilot plant up and running in China. Philip says while it was unfortunate that the commercialisation of that particular pilot plant did not eventuate, the process allowed him to reconsider and develop a more cost effective WtE process.
Philip completed a Bachelors in Biomedical Science in 2023 and has spent a long time researching other elements of converting waste, particularly mixed waste. He was inspired to take his research a step further when confronted with images of dying whales that had consumed plastic waste and a 62-metre-high rubbish mountain in India.
This time around the technology is very different. The business name, Cyclion Energy gives a hint to the direction being taken – short for recycling and ion – Cyclion’s process uses ion to break down both biomass and plastics.
“In the past, we had to separate mixed waste into plastics and biomass, which takes a lot of equipment. That equipment also uses mechanical force to reduce the size of the waste, therefore takes a lot of electricity and is not 100 per cent effective,” Philip says.“I focused on that and using a catalyst to cause liquification to break down plastics and biomass.
“In essence, I created a sophisticated washing machine.”
Think of it as a load of mixed waste, including rubbish bags, being emptied into the ‘washing machine’ and run through various cycles. At each cycle the waste is liquified and degraded until in the end all that’s left in the tank is inorganic matter – solid glass or metals – that can be separated and recovered.
What’s been degraded becomes an oil that can then be further processed as fuel or converted into a flammable gas to generate electricity.
Philip says the technique is effective and by using chemical energy rather than electrical or mechanical, is more efficient.
One of the key differences to other techniques is there’s no need to pre-process. The recycling is done after the biomass and plastics have been removed.
The second difference is the system is modular. While other techniques require large facilities to be economically viable, Philip’s goal is to use large containers so recycling plants can be placed in regional and remote areas, including island nations.
“Currently, island nations have to export their waste because they don’t have room for landfill,” Philip says.
“I want to be able to provide these plants into island nations or remote locations. They would be empowered to deal with their own waste and generate their own energy.”
A problem, apart from feedstock, when using waste-to-energy to process mixed waste, is emissions. Higher temperatures generate gases.
Cyclion is using catalytic decolonisation because it works at low temperature, which means less emissions, lower operational costs and therefore requires less capital.
“Incinerators operate anywhere from 800 to 1000 degrees Celsius,” Philip says. “Operators try to deal with the emissions from incinerators by scrubbing gases, which is expensive. Then gasification runs at 1300 to 1500 degrees Celsius. As the temperature goes up, the energy required also goes up.
“Our system operates between 240 to 310 degrees Celsius. We don’t produce the gases that some other technologies do. Existing technologies are not doing it, or they’re limited in their scope.”
Cyclion Energy is developing its first commercial project in the Philippines where, according to Our World in Data, the population of 114 million people across 7641 islands produces more than one-third of all oceanic plastic waste in the world.
Philip is hoping the project will be commissioned by 2025 and be a reference point to establish one in Australia.
In the meantime, Cyclion Energy is in the process of setting up a sponsorship with the Sea World Foundation as part of a holistic approach to help solve the world’s plastic pollution problem.
“The Sea World Foundation does a lot of research with animals affected by plastics rubbish,” Philip says. “By reducing the amount of plastic in the ocean and rubbish that goes into waterways, hopefully we will help them.”
For more information, visit: www.cyclionenergy
