Turning Plastic Waste into a Commercial-Grade Renewable Green Condensate

The Market Online

22-05-2025

PlasCred Circular Innovations is turning plastic garbage into a commercial-grade product — and doing it in a way that challenges how we think about recycling. Lyndsay Malchuk recently caught up with President and CEO Troy Lupul, to spotlight the who, what and how it's all possible.
The following is a transcription of the above video, and The Market Online has edited it for clarity .
Lyndsay: The first question is, you know, your tech turns mixed plastic waste, really the things that nobody wants, into something petrochemical giants are eyeing. Now, is this just better PR for plastic or are you actually changing the game?
Troy: No, we are a real game changer. What we primarily focused on in the beginning for the evolution of plastic credits, which is PlasCred, what we wanted to do is focus on plastic that will never be recycled. Stuff that'll definitely land in the landfill or incinerated or god forbid, the ocean. So, what we've been able to do is focus in on plastics that were just basically difficult, like your Tesla dashboard, your pen, your glasses, your medical waste. We really focused in on things that were not being recycled. So, it is a game changer.
Lyndsay: Your process converts up to 80% of landfill bound plastics into renewable green condensate. So why hasn't anyone else done this and what's stopping the oil majors from just copying you?
Troy: Well, that's a simple question. Most majors like Shell and Exxon and some of the bigger producers that make plastic as well as do crack ethane, they're not aggregators of plastic. They're not garbage people. They're not going to go out and do dumpster diving and chase. It's not in their mandate or their core competency. So realistically, they build refining capabilities. They're not into, even though they make the virgin feedstock, plastic, they're not aggregators of plastic. And that's where we've created a huge gap between the oil and gas world and the plastic world.
Lyndsay: Why don't we talk about your pilot. The, the Primus pilot has been running for two years now. So what have you learned and really what steps are the next steps to scaling the operation?
Troy: That's one of the expertise because we are, you know, our DNA is hydrocarbons and we're in Calgary and we've got a lot of phenomenal talent here. What we've been able to achieve is what I'm going to say, a very large pilot plant that's very scalable. And what we wanted to do is de-risk it for the investment community, is to allow ourselves to build a big enough pilot plant, which we call Primus, and then be able to scale it to the 500 barrels a day, which will be our next phase.
Lyndsay: Let's talk CN Railroads, they don't usually bet on early stage cleantech, so what's the real value proposition you sold them on and really how critical is this partnership to scaling nationally?
Troy: Well, when we look at plastics as a whole in North America we needed to have a backbone. And we took a page out of Jeff Bezos, logistics, logistics, logistics. And one of the unique features about CN, it's really driven by them, is the fact that, as you know, in North America, most of our goods come from the west coast, go to Chicago, go to Toronto, and there's a lot of empty sea container boxes sitting there as liabilities sitting in these yards doing nothing. So what we wanted to do is take advantage of that backhaul, and this is a crown jewel in our story. We have a competitive advantage to get huge volumes of feedstock in these empty sea containers and backhaul them. Instead of hauling an empty sea container back to Vancouver or Prince Rupert or to Newport Beach, we can actually fill it up with waste plastic, bring it to the best place in the world, which is Fort Saskatchewan to face change that feedstock into a renewable molecule. And that's a huge back haul story for CN. So CN has a been a phenomenal champion of us and we couldn't build this big of a plant without them. So, we're super excited for them as a partner.
Lyndsay: You've recently actually also signed a five year agreement with a global commodities company. Now, Troy, that's big, but what happens if they like your product and they don't like your price? Are you building a business model or just hoping for a buyout?
Troy: No, we are here for the long term. We have built a molecule, a renewable molecule that is repurposed back. And that's one of the things that we're doing differently, is that we are creating a renewable molecule. And by creating a renewable molecule, it can go into all these petrochemical companies around North America. We're building it and we're not making transportation fuel. We're not doing anything silly like that. All we're doing is taking the worst grade of plastic efficiently, bringing it back and taking advantage of the billions of dollars worth of infrastructure in North America that's already built and repurposing that molecule to basically go back into making other building blocks of plastic. So think of it as advanced chemical recycling. Advanced recycling that is done at a large scale, takes advantage of a huge problem. The future looks incredibly bright for us. We're super excited about building our first phase, which is Neos 500 barrel a day system.
Lyndsay: This is such an innovative thing that you've done, and I'm really actually truly surprised that no one's thought about this before. The simple things like the highlighter we use, like you said, the pen, the parts of the EV cars or whatever that nobody's thinking about what happens after.
Troy: The carpet you're walking on right now, your television set, these are the things that we as a human species consume every day for plastics. And I know governments are trying, but we are the real outlet. Like we needed to create this advanced recycling capability because we could throw all the legislation at it you want, and straws well, that's pretty simplified. I mean, that really doesn't move the needle.
The real plastics are the things that don't get caught. We're talking like medical waste. We're talking agricultural waste. We're talking things that are ending up in the ocean. And if you look at it, we are a type of species that needs plastic. Our planes are made from it. Our cars, our computers, our lifestyle. So we need to come in with a real advanced and basically we're all we're doing is we're taking and pushing away the virgin feedstock.
So instead of drilling, fracking and going after that virgin feedstock that the petrochemical companies need, we're basically offsetting that virgin feed stock, which gives a reduction in CO2 by about 92%. So that's a real impact that I can actually show you physically and also show you what we're redoing for a renewable molecule.
Lyndsay: I know that we just have a little bit of time left, but we spoke a little bit about this last time off camera. I want to know what got you into this.
Troy: My background is water treatment, and when I got into doing what is called removing microplastics from water, what I couldn't understand was the reject stream or basically once you remove the plastic, it went back into the water again. So why would you clean the water and send it back? And one of the things, using my own funds, I went around the world and I couldn't figure out why this was not working. And what you saw in life is that people think that you can grind plastic and reuse it. It doesn't work that way when you have cross contamination because there's so many species of plastic. So when you're sitting on a Boeing plane or an Airbus, the back of that seat plastic is so much different than your pen. Your computer screen is much different than what you have as a kid's toy.
So, when you co-mingle those species of plastic, they're unrecyclable, they're just too much to sort out and grind. Whereas what we've done is we've basically have created a funnel where we can take all species of plastics no matter what we use on terra firma, and we can put that back to original Mother Earth molecule. And that happened because we've got the skillset here. We've got this incredible talent pool in our own country and in Alberta where we build these complex refineries. And a lot of it leads to, what I would say is much more complicated problems like taking sulfur out of gas, Sag-D thermal. So we took all those talents and we applied it to this problem, and that's why we've been so successful compared to anybody else in the world. A lot of petrochemical companies want a renewable molecule.
They have an ethical choice. If I'm going to make billions of tons of plastic and sell it to, Ford, GM, all the automotive, medical, I need a recycling story. But I can't do that with mechanical guys. They're not big enough and the logistics isn't there. Here we've got a backbone with CN, and now we can create a renewable molecule that takes advantage of North America's infrastructure, which is billions of dollars worth of refining capacity that can offset virgin feed stock and repurpose it back into plastic again. So, think of me as an above ground oil company. I'm drilling into an above ground oil field.
Lyndsay: So perfectly put. Now, you've listened, you've experienced things firsthand, and then you built that bridge, which is such a huge step for you. And I'm so happy that you were able to come on and just break this all down for us, literally.
Troy: Thank you. And the goal here is we're we've got a good team. We've got good pedigree in this. We've all been into the bigger projects, but I'm super excited about this company because it does make an impact. You can actually visually see it, you can actually see different species of plastic coming out of the ocean. We can two phase that back to a renewable molecule and that's what's really gratifying. Whereas, you know, other things are kind of greenwashing, whereas here it's got a really big impact. You can actually physically see it.
You can PlasCred Circular Innovations Inc. on the CSE under the ticker symbol PLAS and their website is plascred.com
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