Circular Plastics Fund grows with new investments

Closed Loop Partners’ Circular Plastics Fund has added Chevron Phillips Chemical (CPChem) and Charter Next Generation (CNG) as new funders, bringing the fund’s total capital to $45 million. 

The Circular Plastics Fund is intended to support the development of plastics recycling and recovery infrastructure in North America and is managed by Closed Loop Partners, based in New York. It is focused on meeting the growing need to recycle rigid and flexible polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) plastics in the United States and Canada.

Global companies CPChem, with global headquarters in The Woodlands, Texas, and CNG, headquartered in Chicago, join existing investors Dow, LyondellBasell, Nova Chemicals, SK Geo Centric Co. and Sealed Air.

“We saw the speed with which Closed Loop Partners’ Circular Plastics Fund put capital to work and determined that investing in the fund would help address our impact goals,” says Rick Wagner, sustainability policy and program manager at CPChem. “Collaboration will be a key component in advancing the transition to a circular economy. We look forward to joining the Circular Plastics Fund and furthering work to achieve a more sustainable future.”

“We chose to invest through Closed Loop Partners because of their shared sense of urgency to invest in high-impact businesses that can scale to match the global plastic waste challenge,” says Hemal Vyas, vice president of Sustainability and Strategy, GNG.

The fund was established in 2021 with $25 million from Dow, LyondellBasell and Nova Chemicals. Later that year, SK Geo Centric contributed $10 million to the fund, while Sealed Air contributed $5 million. The fund is seeking additional investments from businesses across the plastics value chain to grow to $100 million.

In its first year, the Circular Plastics Fund made investments in a range of solutions, including sortation technology and recycling infrastructure for plastics. Investments include:

• SMR (formerly Sims Municipal Recycling), a leading recycling company managing several municipal recycling programs across the United States;
• Myplas, a new 170,000-square-foot flexible film recycling plant in Minnesota;
• Greyparrot, a leading artificial intelligence waste analytics platform designed to improve transparency and automation for plastics sortation in recycling facilities; and
• additional debt financing to Waste Commission of Scott County, a solid waste district in Northeast Iowa.

“The Closed Loop Circular Plastics Fund’s investments work to catalyze a systemic shift in plastics supply chains, enabling companies to transition from a linear to circular model that utilizes recycled materials,” Jennifer Louie, head of the Circular Plastics Fund at Closed Loop Partners, says. “Looking ahead, we have a strong pipeline of companies across the plastics recycling value chain and need more capital to invest in these critical solutions. This additional $10 million from our new investors will allow us to accelerate our capital deployment and reach our impact goals. We hope to see other companies with circular plastics goals join to help us achieve impact at scale.”

Closed Loop Partners says it launched the Circular Plastics Fund as part of its broader strategy to reduce, reuse and recycle plastics. The fund seeks to provide catalytic debt and equity financing that will lead to additional mainstream investments into recycling solutions and infrastructure that can help address bottlenecks in the recycling system for PE, PP and flexible plastics.

According to Closed Loop Partners, the current supply of recycled plastics meets only 6 percent of the demand for the most commonly used plastics in the U.S. and Canada. Increasing the recovery and circularity of plastics, alongside material reduction solutions, scalable reuse systems and innovative new materials, can prevent millions of tons of plastics from going to landfills or ending up in the natural environment and help meet an addressable market for plastics with potential revenue opportunities of $120 billion in the U.S. and Canada alone.

“The investment from the Closed Loop Circular Plastics Fund was critical to our expansion into the U.S.,” says Andrew Pieterse, CEO of Myplas USA. “The fund played a critical role to help bring key stakeholders from across the plastics value chain to grow much-needed regional circular systems for flexible plastics in the U.S. We are thrilled to leverage the fund’s capital and strong network to help us build a successful initial operation in Minnesota followed by ambitious expansion plans to other parts of the Midwest and beyond.”

Closed Loop Partners says it has more than $500 million in assets under management and has made more than 65 investments, keeping 3.6 million tons of materials in circulation and avoiding 6.8 million metric tons of CO2 emissions to date.