Season 3, Episode 6 of Cleantech Talks features host Sofie Campbell in conversation with Francis Doumet, Co-founder and CEO at Metaspectral. The two discuss the company's spectral imaging technology and its various applications, including how it's being used in optimizing plastics recycling processes.
5:20 - Francis: Metaspectral is deploying its technology into a variety of industries, including defense, space, recycling and agriculture. At the core the technology is much the same but just need to do some integration. Metaspectral can detect that there's an object floating on water, for example, and can determine what that object is made out of. In agriculture, we're able to detect how plants react to different types of pesticides which enables us to measure the rate of disease in plants.
7:40 - Francis: We went through a pivot when we started the company, initially the concept for Metaspectral was that we would use machine learning to compress data more efficiently. But then realized that there was a greater value proposition for tackling data with more depth to it - we had more value to add than just traditional imaging.
10:00 - Francis: We recycle only 9% of the plastics we use in Canada and the Government of Canada has set ambitious goals of achieving 75% diversion from landfills. So going from 9% to 75% we need to have a lot of innovation in terms of recycling capacity. Part of it has to do with increasing demand for recycled material but part of it also has to do with making the supply better and higher quality. The government has passed a draft law relating to the market for recycled plastics, so now plastics producers will be required to include a certain amount of recycled plastics in their products.
13:30 - Francis: The recycling plant we're working with is quite automated, but there is still 30% contamination, meaning that 30% of material that is not supposed to be there. And that is the issue that we're trying to solve.
14:25 - Francis: There are a few other players that we're aware of who operate in the recycling automation space. At least one other in Canada, a few in The States, some in Europe as well. But we believe that we're complementary to those. The others on the market focus on automating the tasks that a human can do. Whereas we are really trying to sort beyond what a human can do or existing machinery can do. That doesn't mean you don't need those other machines on the market.
17:20 - Francis: We are very optimistic about the recycling market because we think that what we can do is really unique and very valuable. It is also lower maintenance from a sales standpoint compared to servicing the defense industry, for example.
21:00 - Francis: Public policy is really important to creating a stable market for recycled plastics. The whole recycling industry had a really hard time in 2016 when gas prices dropped super low because it suddenly meant that the economic benefit to using recycled plastics was inverse. So regulation, like requiring that people use a certain amount of recycled plastics in their products, is really important. Landfilling is so much cheaper than recycling which means that the recycling industry will always require some amount of policy to help bolster it against the cheapness of virgin plastics production and landfilling.