Aduro Clean Technologies presented its chemical recycling process to PepsiCo teams in Mexico City on September 23, with flexible and multilayer packaging as its subject, a material category that defeats most recycling routes.
Aduro was one of 10 companies invited to the second edition of the PepsiCo Sustainability Innovation Hub, held at Hábitat CDMX. Chief Revenue Officer Eric Appelman was scheduled to present the company’s Hydrochemolytic Technology (HCT) as a chemical recycling pathway for polyolefin-rich flexible films and multilayer packaging. Participants were asked to respond to a defined PepsiCo challenge and set out their proposed solution, its potential value, economics and scalability.
The Innovation Hub is a programme for engaging external innovators, and the invitation isn’t an endorsement, investment or commercial agreement from PepsiCo. What it provided was direct access to PepsiCo teams working in sustainability, packaging and innovation across Latin America and the wider organisation, on a problem the brand owner had defined itself.
“Brand owners already have workable routes for clean, rigid packaging,” said Yazan Al Homsi, a Vancouver and Dubai-based investor who holds an equity position in Aduro. “Flexible packaging is where they’re short of options. It’s the toughest commercial test in chemical recycling, and a new technology has to pass it on economics as well as chemistry.”
Why flexible packaging resists recycling
The snack wrapper may be the most stubborn object in packaging recycling. Aduro’s own description of the problem is straightforward. Multilayer films are engineered for barrier protection, strength and sealability. At end of life, tightly bonded layers and incompatible materials make separation and conventional mechanical recycling difficult, which reduces process efficiency and the quality of the recycled material.
The volumes are large. ECOCE, a Mexican packaging collection and recycling association, estimates that Mexico generates about 1.5 million tonnes of flexible plastic packaging each year. The streams flagged in its mapping include snack and cookie wrappers, grocery and bread bags, pet food packaging, dairy and cold-cut packaging and resealable pouches.
These formats are far from the controlled polypropylene and polyethylene blends Aduro has been running in its pilot plant. Printed films, adhesives and mixed layers introduce variables that a clean test blend doesn’t, which is why the evaluation criteria include contaminant behaviour and residues alongside yield.
Mechanical recycling of mixed multilayer film, where possible, tends to produce lower-grade material with limited end uses. Chemical routes aim instead to break the polymers down into hydrocarbon products that can feed new plastics production. In principle that avoids the downcycling problem, though it raises its own questions about energy use, yield and cost that only operating data can answer.
The ECOCE testing route
Aduro’s presentation drew on its collaboration with ECOCE, whose members include PepsiCo and whose work spans food and beverage companies representing more than 400 brands. The partnership, which began in December 2025, is structured in phases.
Phase 1, completed in July, used ECOCE’s national feedstock mapping programme to select candidate post-consumer flexible packaging streams, including flexible polypropylene, flexible polyethylene and multilayer formats. Those streams then moved into laboratory-scale HCT testing.
Results haven’t been published yet.
The testing is designed to measure processability, product characteristics, yield, residues, contaminant behaviour and mass balance. If laboratory results support it, selected streams will progress to a third phase on Aduro’s Next Generation Process pilot plant in London, Ontario, intended to support scale-up assessment, customer evaluation and commercial analysis. Aduro chief executive Ofer Vicus said Phase 1 had turned the work into “a defined technical feedstock program.”
The phased design gives outside observers a clear sequence of checkpoints: feedstock mapping, laboratory results, pilot results and then commercial analysis. Each stage produces evidence before the next commitment.
What a passing grade looks like
For a brand owner, a credible recycling route for flexible packaging needs more than a successful test. It needs consistent output from variable feedstock, a product downstream users will accept, and a cost that compares sensibly with the current fate of much of this material: landfill or incineration.
That’s a high bar.
Yazan Al Homsi, a CFA charterholder who founded Founders Round Capital in Vancouver in 2017, said investors should look first at two measures in the laboratory data. “Mass balance and residues are the numbers I’d look at first,” he said. “They show where the material actually goes, and that decides whether the economics hold up at commercial scale.”
Mass balance in this context accounts for how much of the input ends up as useful liquid product, gas or residue. For flexible films, where non-polymer components are part of the package, that accounting will show how much of each tonne a process can return to the plastics value chain.
What to watch
Aduro hasn’t disclosed any commercial arrangement with PepsiCo, and the ECOCE programme remains at the laboratory stage. For the company’s shareholders, who include Yazan Al Homsi, the next verifiable milestones are the laboratory results and any decision to move selected streams to pilot testing.
In parallel, pilot operating data is informing the design of Aduro’s planned 10,000-tonne-per-year first-of-a-kind plant at Chemelot in the Netherlands. Whether flexible films eventually become part of the feedstock for facilities of that kind depends on results that haven’t yet been published.
Yazan Al Homsi, whose portfolio and investment approach have been profiled by IBTimes UK, said he expects the laboratory data to carry more weight with brand owners than any presentation. Snack wrappers have defeated a long list of recycling approaches, and a credible answer could change how brand owners set their packaging targets.
