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A look at SPTek ECLIPSE®, a 1% polyolefin additive built to give plastic that won't be recycled a built-in exit plan.
Roughly 350 million tons of plastic reach the end of their life every year, and about a quarter of that is mismanaged — not recycled, not incinerated, not safely landfilled, just loose in the environment. A big share of it is polyolefins. Polyethylene and polypropylene, the workhorses behind stretch film, pouches, straws, and shopping bags, together make up something like 45% of everything the world produces as plastic. Most of it is exactly the kind of flexible packaging that recycling infrastructure struggles to touch.
I recently spoke with Yaman Peksenar, director of science and technology at Smart Plastic Technologies, about an additive called SPTek ECLIPSE® that's built for that gap — the plastic that, realistically, will not be recycled.
ECLIPSE gets mixed into polyolefin resin at about 1%, the same way a manufacturer would add colorant, or a masterbatch. Once blended in, it's invisible: no change to color, clarity, or how the plastic behaves in use. Inside that 1%, though, sits a catalyst paired with stabilizers whose entire job is to hold it in check.
That's the clever part. The stabilizers get consumed first, and only once they're used up does the catalyst go to work — so a manufacturer can dial in a product's functional shelf life, from about a year out to seven-plus. The formulation is built to preserve the product through its working life before the next stage begins; something like a stretch-wrap film gets tuned for a shorter run, a piece of rigid tableware for a longer one, with the exact timing set by the product and its conditions of use. Heat and UV exposure at end of life finally wake the catalyst up, and moisture afterward gets biofilm growing on the surface.
From there, it's an oxidation reaction. The catalyst cuts the plastic's long carbon backbone into shorter and shorter pieces — company data describes the molecular weight stepping down from around 200,000 to roughly 5,000 and below, the point at which microbes stop treating the material as inert and start treating it as a food source. Continue that far enough and the plastic's carbon converts, at the molecular level, into CO2, water, and biomass — how far and how fast depends on the conditions it's breaking down in.
The claims aren't just a company brochure. Smart Plastic has run its ECLIPSE-treated film through a stack of third-party labs:
Smart Plastic secured a U.S. patent in June 2026 on specific ECLIPSE masterbatch formulations. “An issued patent is an important milestone for Smart Plastic and for SPTek Eclipse,” Yaman told PlasticsToday when it came through, pointing to the years of USPTO examination behind it. Colleague Robin Misir, VP of operations, described the skepticism Smart Plastic runs into plainly: manufacturers considering the material tend to ask the same question first — is this real, or just another pending application? Today, Smart Plastic uses ECLIPSE in both flexible HDPE/LLDPE packaging and rigid, food-contact polypropylene.
Here's the part I found most reassuring: ECLIPSE isn't sold as competition for recycling. The pitch is closer to this — if you're recycling, great, keep doing it; if your product ends up in a landfill anyway, this is what you need. Before end-of-life triggers kick in, ECLIPSE-treated resin runs through standard mechanical recycling equipment just fine, and recyclers add their own stabilizers that make accidental activation even less likely. Post-consumer recycled content can be blended in alongside it, too, without giving up EPR credit.
The friction shows up elsewhere. Recycling guidelines currently prohibit additives like this one outright, and shifting that position means working through eco-modularity credits under emerging EPR legislation — a slow, expensive lobbying track. Against bio-based polyethylene (non-degradable, roughly triple the cost) or compostable resins (a 20%+ premium), ECLIPSE is a drop-in replacement at under a 5% cost bump with no production-line changes. ECLIPSE itself is already co-branded into a commercial stretch-wrap line, Sigma Vanish, built around the tagline: if you can't recycle it, make it vanish.
The economics favor adoption. The habit doesn't, yet — reformulating a cost-optimized supply chain is a hard sell until legislation or litigation makes the status quo more expensive than the change.
If your product's most likely ending is a landfill rather than a recycling bin, wouldn't you want the plastic itself carrying an exit plan?
This article originally appeared in Dr. John Skabardonis’s newsletter Tech Nuggets, which you may subscribe to here. John is the founder of Optimist Consulting and is a PhD chemist, keynote speaker, and Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM). He has spent decades making complex, technical ideas impossible to ignore. As a subject matter expert at the intersection of science, innovation, and sustainability, he explores where science and environmental responsibility is at the core of all activity every single day.
Modern landfills are engineered to contain waste, not transform it, which is why what happens to plastic underground is decided at the formulation stage.
Understanding how landfills work starts with recognizing that modern municipal solid waste landfills (MSWLFs) are precision-engineered containment systems, not open pits. They use layered liners, leachate collection pipes, gas extraction wells, and decades of post-closure monitoring to manage the slow chemical transformation of everything buried inside them. But understanding how that engineering works reveals something the system cannot solve on its own: what happens to individual plastic particles inside the waste mass is entirely a materials problem, one that begins at the formulation stage, not at the landfill gate.
The seven facts below move through landfill operations in sequence, from the moment a truck arrives to the question converters and brand owners ask us most: does your material choice today determine an environmental outcome decades from now? According to the EPA's most recent national waste data, roughly 50% of U.S. municipal solid waste ends up in landfills. That figure alone explains why the answer matters.
Disposal at a modern MSWLF begins at the scalehouse. The loaded truck crosses a certified weighbridge, its gross weight is recorded, and operators log the hauler, waste type, vehicle, and time. From there, an attendant directs the truck along internal roads to the permitted disposal area, called the working face. Operators keep that active area intentionally small to control litter, odors, and pests.
After the truck tips its load, personnel may inspect the exposed waste to identify prohibited or hazardous materials. A dozer then spreads the waste into controlled layers, typically about two feet thick, and a heavy compactor makes repeated passes to crush and consolidate the material. The empty truck returns to the scalehouse for an outbound tare weigh; the net weight difference is used for billing and regulatory reporting. At the end of the day, the compacted working face is covered with soil, foam, or approved tarps to limit odors, vectors, and windblown litter until operations resume.
The working face is the visible part of the operation. Beneath it, a modern sanitary landfill cell is a carefully sequenced stack of barriers and drainage systems. Starting from the prepared subgrade and moving upward: a secondary composite liner (typically an HDPE geomembrane over compacted clay), a leak-detection drainage layer, a primary composite liner, a leachate drainage layer with perforated collection pipes, and then protective soil before the waste mass itself.
That double-liner design functions as a redundant containment system. The primary liner contains leachate; the secondary layer captures anything that bypasses it. Both feed toward sumps where pumps remove liquid for treatment, discharge, or shipment to a wastewater facility. Associated systems include vertical gas wells, stormwater drainage, groundwater-monitoring wells, and access roads. This is the physical foundation that every piece of waste, including the packaging your customers put on retail shelves, eventually rests on.
Buried organic waste moves through two stages. First, aerobic microbes consume trapped oxygen and produce mostly carbon dioxide. Once oxygen depletes, anaerobic microorganisms take over, generating landfill gas (LFG), roughly 50% methane and 50% carbon dioxide, plus trace compounds including hydrogen sulfide, siloxanes, and volatile organics. Operators capture this gas through vertical extraction wells drilled into the waste mass, often supplemented by horizontal perforated pipes in newer sections, with vacuum blowers drawing gas to a central header.
From the header, the options are flaring, direct energy use, or upgrading to renewable natural gas. Enclosed flares combust methane into carbon dioxide, preventing direct methane emissions; internal combustion engines or turbines burn the gas to generate electricity; and advanced treatment can strip CO₂ and other contaminants to produce pipeline-quality methane. Managing methane is not optional for large facilities, federal Clean Air Act regulations require gas collection and control systems at qualifying MSWLFs.
Compaction and low oxygen make a landfill environmentally safe; they are also exactly what prevents meaningful decomposition. Food scraps that would compost in weeks under aerobic conditions can persist for years underground. Paper remains readable for decades in dry cells. Steel cans take roughly 50–75 years, according to published decomposition data. Plastic bottles run to about 450 years. Polystyrene foam exceeds 500 years.
Gas generation often peaks around five to seven years after burial but can continue in smaller volumes for 50 years or more. Post-closure care at MSWLFs typically runs at least 30 years for this reason: the waste mass remains chemically and biologically active long after the last truck arrives. The low-oxygen containment environment that engineering creates is simultaneously a preservation chamber for everything that cannot biodegrade without it.
Polyethylene and polypropylene lack the chemical structure for microbial breakdown under landfill conditions. Without UV exposure and oxygen, photo-oxidative degradation stalls completely. What continues is mechanical fragmentation: compaction cracks and splinters plastic items into progressively smaller pieces over time. Those fragments don't bio-assimilate. They persist as polymer particles, eventually reaching microplastic scale, a risk that then compounds through the leachate pathway.
The distinction between degradation and bio-assimilation is not semantic. Degradation is physical breakdown into smaller pieces. Bio-assimilation is conversion of polymer carbon into CO₂, water, and biomass. Only the second outcome removes plastic from the persistent-material category. Research documents microplastics in landfill leachate and raises concern about their potential to reach groundwater where liner systems are compromised, though migration risk depends significantly on liner performance and site conditions. As for timing, studies and simulations indicate that fragmentation of conventional polyolefin films can begin within years under some conditions, while meaningful bio-assimilation for untreated polymers is effectively absent across any realistic timeframe.
For converters and brand owners facing regulatory pressure around plastic waste and microplastic pollution, that gap is the central issue. The material design decisions made before a product is sold determine what happens inside a landfill decades later. No liner system or gas collection network changes what happens to the polymer chain itself.
A bio-assimilation masterbatch additive is a formulation blended into polyethylene or polypropylene during standard converting processes. At end of life, in the anaerobic, biologically active environment of a landfill, it is designed to stimulate microbial colonization and assimilation of the polymer chain, converting plastic carbon into CO₂, water, and biomass rather than leaving persistent fragments.
Smart Plastic Technologies developed SPTek ECLIPSE®. Smart Plastic Technologies, a Certified B Corporation founded in 2016, based in Wheeling, Illinois, formulated ECLIPSE® as our patented bio-assimilation masterbatch technology for polyethylene flexible packaging and polypropylene rigid food-contact applications. It deploys as a drop-in additive, fully compatible with existing converting processes without retooling production lines.
ASTM D5526 measured anaerobic biodegradation under high-solids conditions, the laboratory analog of a landfill environment, tracking the percentage of carbon converted from a plastic sample into gaseous carbon under accelerated conditions. Note that ASTM D5526 was withdrawn in 2025; the data below was generated under that standard prior to its withdrawal, and we continue to evaluate which current protocols best represent real landfill conditions as the standards landscape evolves. Performance has also been evaluated using D6954-based protocols. Converters and brand owners should request full test documentation when assessing any bio-assimilation claim.
ECLIPSE®-treated film is fully recyclable before activation and FDA compliant for food-contact applications. That addresses the dual concern most procurement and sustainability teams raise: demonstrable recyclability while the product is in use, and a measurably different laboratory-measured end-of-life pathway when it inevitably reaches landfill disposal.
Not all additives that carry an environmental claim work the same way, and the differences are significant under anaerobic landfill conditions. Oxo-degradable additives are metal-based pro-oxidants that catalyze oxidation, chain scission, and fragmentation. They depend on oxygen, heat, and UV exposure to function. Landfills are dark and oxygen-limited. Under those conditions, the oxidation pathway is strongly suppressed, and what occurs instead is slower, uncontrolled fragmentation that generates microplastics without achieving meaningful bio-assimilation. Regulatory bodies including the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), in its 2019 restriction proposal on oxo-degradable plastics, identified this as a core risk: these additives can accelerate the rate at which conventional plastic becomes microplastic rather than reducing it.
When evaluating any bio-assimilation additive, the validation criteria matter as much as the claim. The additive must be tested under landfill-relevant conditions: anaerobic, high-solids, using recognized protocols, not open-air oxidation studies. It must not compromise recyclability before activation. And the supporting data should be reviewed carefully for whether testing was conducted by an independent laboratory or by the manufacturer.
We developed the Smart Standard™ as a proposed end-of-life labeling framework specifically for bio-assimilating polyolefin packaging. The framework defines bio-assimilation as a specific, testable outcome: microorganisms must actually take up and metabolize the material's carbon in a defined biological environment, within a defined timeframe. That distinguishes it from vague "biodegradable" language, which specifies neither environment nor duration, and from compostability standards, which describe a material-plus-system outcome under industrial composting conditions.
The Smart Standard™ gives converters and brand owners a defined compliance and communication structure, allowing them to make a credible, testable claim about their packaging's landfill end-of-life rather than a generic sustainability statement. As U.S. states tighten regulations around plastic waste labeling and biodegradability claims, that level of specificity becomes a competitive and legal asset, not just a marketing choice.
ECLIPSE® is designed so that products can enter the standard recycle stream before activation occurs, keeping them compatible with existing recycling infrastructure. This aligns with circular economy principles: recycle first, and when a product inevitably reaches landfill disposal, the bio-assimilation mechanism engages rather than leaving fragmentation as the only outcome. Laboratory results show a measurably different carbon-conversion pathway compared with untreated controls; real-world validation under field conditions continues to develop alongside the broader standards landscape.
For sustainability officers and procurement teams managing ESG reporting requirements, that compatibility matters. A product that is recyclable before activation and engineered for a laboratory-demonstrated different landfill outcome addresses the full packaging lifecycle, not just one stage of it.
The engineering inside a modern MSWLF is sophisticated. Double liners, leachate collection, gas extraction, and decades of post-closure monitoring all exist because the engineers who design these systems understand what happens to complex waste over long timeframes. What that engineering cannot do is change the chemistry of an individual plastic particle inside the waste mass. Liners don't bio-assimilate polyethylene. Gas wells don't convert polypropylene fragments into biomass.
That is a material science problem, and it has to be addressed upstream, at the formulation and converting stage. Bio-assimilation additives like SPTek ECLIPSE® address it at the source, with laboratory data generated under ASTM D5526 prior to its 2025 withdrawal, deployed through a drop-in process that works within existing production infrastructure. The seven facts above trace a straight line from the moment a truck arrives at the scalehouse to the polymer-level outcome decades later. If you want to understand how landfills work and how ECLIPSE® fits your converting process, that line is the right place to start, and our team is ready to walk through it with you.
Yes, ECLIPSE®-treated film is fully recyclable before activation. This means products can enter the standard recycle stream prior to landfill disposal, keeping compatibility with existing recycling infrastructure and supporting a recycle-first approach.
Yes, ECLIPSE® is FDA compliant for food-contact applications. That compliance supports its use in polyethylene flexible packaging and polypropylene rigid food-contact uses while maintaining recyclability before activation.
You should review the full test documentation and consider results generated under ASTM D5526 prior to its 2025 withdrawal alongside D6954-based protocols. Requesting independent laboratory validation and selecting protocols that represent anaerobic, high-solids landfill conditions are important for assessing any bio-assimilation claim.
Microplastics in landfill leachate raise concern about potential groundwater reach where liner systems are compromised. The migration risk depends significantly on liner performance and site conditions, so containment integrity is a key factor in whether fragments move beyond the landfill system.
U.S. Patent No. 12,668,672 includes issued claims directed to specific SPTek ECLIPSE® master batch formulations, moving Smart Plastic from patent-pending to patent-protected.
CHICAGO, Ill. (July 14, 2026) — Smart Plastic Technologies, LLC today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent No. 12,668,672 B2, “Bio-Assimilation Master Batch Composition, Processes for Producing Polymeric Bio-Assimilating Material Therefrom, and Products Produced Therefrom.” The issued claims are directed to specific SPTek ECLIPSE® master batch formulations for polyolefin applications, including formulations designed for approximately 18-month and 24-month functional-life use cases. The patent marks an important transition from patent-pending to issued-patent status for Smart Plastic’s SPTek ECLIPSE® technology platform. The newly issued patent is part of a broader Smart Plastic patent portfolio strategy, which includes pending continuation and continuation-in-part applications directed to additional aspects of the SPTek ECLIPSE® technology platform.
For a plastics industry crowded with companies claiming similar end-of-life solutions, an issued U.S. patent provides a concrete, publicly reviewable milestone. The issued claims are directed to specific SPTek ECLIPSE® master batch formulations and were allowed after examination against cited prior art, including references relating to microorganism colonization of plastics and biodegradation testing. Smart Plastic separately supports its performance claims through technical testing, including ASTM D5526 and D6954-based work.
“An issued patent is an important milestone for Smart Plastic and for SPTek ECLIPSE®,” said Yaman Peksenar, Director of Science & Technology at Smart Plastic Technologies. “After a multi-year USPTO examination, we now have issued claims to specific master batch chemistries that are central to our SPTek ECLIPSE® platform. Combined with our technical testing program, which is third-party validated, this gives manufacturers and brand owners a clearer basis to evaluate the technology.”
SmartPlastic’s SPTek ECLIPSE® transforms conventional polyethylene and polypropylene — resin Types 2, 4, and 5 — into materials that, as supported by Smart Plastic's functional testing, promote bio-assimilation at the end of their intended functional life, supporting breakdown into CO2, water, and biomass rather than fragmenting into microplastics. The newly issued patent’s claims cover master batch formulations tuned to specific functional lifespans — from a formulation built on HDPE/LLDPE blends designed for about 18 months of use in flexible packaging, to a polypropylene formulation designed for about 24 months of use in rigid, food-contact applications such as consumer tableware. The issued claims recite a 1% inclusion rate for the approximately 18-month formulation and a 1.5% inclusion rate for the approximately 24-month polypropylene formulation, while Smart Plastic separately evaluates recyclability and food-contact suitability for applicable products.
“Our manufacturing partners ask us the same question in every first meeting: is this real or is it another pending application dressed up as a solution?” said Robin Misir, Vice President of Operations at Smart Plastic Technologies. “Now the answer includes an issued U.S. patent number they can review themselves, alongside Smart Plastic’s technical data. That changes the conversation with converters and brand owners who’ve been sitting on the sidelines waiting for exactly this kind of issued-patent milestone and technical documentation before they commit a production line to SPTek ECLIPSE®.”
SmartPlastic is pairing the announcement with a renewed push for the Smart Standard™, the company’s proposed end-of-life disposal and labeling framework for bio-assimilating plastics. The company argues that conventional recycling captures only about 9% of plastic waste and that industrial composting requires infrastructure most communities do not have, leaving polyolefin packaging with no realistic end-of-life path today. Smart Plastic is inviting brand owners, converters, and regulators to review the Smart Standard alongside the newly issued patent documentation at changetheplastic.com.
SmartPlastic Technologies LLC, a certified B Corporation, is based in Wheeling, Illinois. Founded in 2016, the company is revolutionizing the potential of plastic to improve the environment for future generations. Its flagship bio-assimilation technology, SPTek ECLIPSE®, is supported by U.S. Patent No. 12,668,672 and is designed to help selected polyethylene and polypropylene applications undergo bio-assimilation after the article’s intended useful life, with the goal of reducing persistent plastic fragments. Smart Plastic’s mission is to prevent persistent microplastic pollution in everyday packaging solutions. This represents a key and critical aspect of the company’s commitment to plastic lifecycle management. Smart Plastic works with manufacturing partners to evaluate product-specific performance, recyclability, and applicable regulatory requirements. All Smart Plastic technologies are designed to alter the very nature of plastic for the benefit of both people and the planet. Proudly made in the United States, all Smart Plastic products are 100% recyclable pre-activation, FDA compliant, and purposely designed for the circular and regenerative economies. Learn more at www.changetheplastic.com
Smart Plastic and its SPTek ECLIPSE® bio-assimilation technology took the top honor at Trellis Impact 26 in San Francisco.
CHICAGO, Ill. — June 26, 2026 — Smart Plastic Technologies, LLC has been named Trellis Group’s 2026 Climate Tech Startup of the Year, an honor awarded following a live pitch competition on June 25 at Trellis Impact 26 in San Francisco. The company, maker of SPTek ECLIPSE® bio-assimilation technology, was selected from a field of finalists whose innovations spanned battery materials, industrial waste-to-chemicals, critical-mineral recovery, and advanced coatings.
Smart Plastic earned the top vote from the audience for an additive technology aimed at the roughly 91 percent of plastic that is never recycled. Chief Sustainability Officer Sumathi Pakki delivered the company’s winning remarks.
“Plastic was not designed with its end in mind. We changed that.”
— Sumathi Pakki, Chief Sustainability Officer
Smart Plastic was earlier named to Trellis’s “15 Climate Tech Startups to Watch in 2026” in the material innovation category, a list reserved for seed to Series A companies with real traction and customers already signed up. The recognition places Smart Plastic among the climate technologies that corporate buyers, operators, and investors are prioritizing for near-term deployment.
SPTek ECLIPSE® is a drop-in additive used at approximately one percent inclusion, with no new equipment required. It is designed to preserve performance during use, then support bio-assimilation of the plastic to carbon dioxide, water, and biomass if the material is not recovered, as validated by independent laboratories.
“This recognition belongs to a team that has chosen to win on science and credibility rather than hype. It comes at a moment when brand owners need end-of-life solutions that are operationally realistic and ready to scale.” — Yaman Peksenar, Director of Science & Technology
Smart Plastic Technologies, based in Wheeling, Illinois, develops materials solutions designed to improve the end-of-life outcomes of everyday plastic. Its platform, including its patented SPTek ECLIPSE® bio-assimilation technology, is built to work with conventional polyolefins while supporting a more responsible pathway when plastic is not recovered. Smart Plastic Technologies is a Certified B Corporation. Learn more at changetheplastic.com.
View the presentation on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/gPt4zUasQyk
Our Chief Sustainability Officer Suma Pakki takes the Startup Day Mainstage in San Francisco this week, pitching ECLIPSE® as a Materials finalist for Trellis Group's Startup of the Year.
Five weeks ago, we asked you to vote. You did. Today we can say it plainly: Smart Plastic Technologies advanced out of the Materials field of Trellis’s Startups to Watch competition to the in-person finale, and we are in the running to be named Trellis Group’s Startup of the Year.
The deciding pitches happen live during the Startups to Watch Finale on the Startup Day Mainstage — Wednesday, June 24, 9:00–10:30 a.m. at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Suma Pakki and Yaman Peksenar are carrying the SPTek ECLIPSE® story into the room, in front of thousands of the operators, buyers, and investors who actually move this industry, with leading climate investors as judges.
Trellis Impact is not a trade show with a recycling booth in the corner. It is the premier gathering for sustainable business, convening roughly 2,500 leaders, 300-plus speakers, and 100-plus sessions across the people who turn climate ideas into deployed solutions: Fortune 500 decision-makers, climate-tech founders, and the capital that funds them.
The program is organized around five tracks that, read together, describe the whole arc of the clean economy:
Smart Plastic lives at the intersection of the first and the last. “Close the Loop” is the entire premise of our company: a polyolefin should perform during its useful life, stay recyclable while it is needed, and then, if it escapes recovery, return to nature instead of fragmenting into permanent pollution. “Unlock Startup Innovation” is the bridge we are crossing right now, from validated science to deployed product.
Startups to Watch is a fast-pitch competition across three strategic categories: Data Center Solutions, Material Innovation, and Climate Adaptation. Trellis named the top finalists in each, ran virtual pitch webinars with community voting, and now brings the standouts to the in-person finale. One company walks away as Startup of the Year. Last year that title went to DexMat.
The finale field is a genuinely strong, cross-category group. Joining Smart Plastic on the Startup Day Mainstage are Skyven Technologies, Helix Earth, Airloom Energy, and Mojave Energy Systems — companies working on industrial heat, efficiency, and clean energy. We are the materials answer in that lineup: the one rethinking what plastic becomes after its useful life. Being measured against companies of that caliber, judged by investors from Engine Ventures, Prelude Ventures, Voyager Ventures, VoLo Earth, and At One Ventures, is exactly the kind of pressure a deployment-ready solution should welcome.
It matters that this recognition comes from Trellis specifically. Trellis sets its eligibility bar at Seed-to-Series-A companies that are incorporated, staffed, and have a product ready to test or deploy — traction over hype. That is the conversation we want to be in.
For a startup fighting an entrenched industry, visibility is leverage. The plastics value chain is slow to change, and some of the loudest voices in end-of-life standards have incentives to keep things as they are. A stage like Trellis Impact lets us make our case directly to the people who can adopt ECLIPSE® — brand owners, converters, and packaging buyers — without waiting for permission from the gatekeepers.
The recognition also arrives at a moment when capital is flowing to climate companies that can show results rather than slides. We are not pitching a concept. SPTek ECLIPSE® is a drop-in additive at roughly 1% inclusion that requires no retooling, is FDA-compliant for food contact (GRAS), and runs on existing extrusion lines. Independent testing validates bio-assimilation across marine, terrestrial, and anaerobic landfill conditions, with no microplastic residue left behind. And the model is already working in market: more than $1.1M in sales through Q1 2026 and a manufacturing partnership with Sigma Plastics.
That is the difference we will put in front of the judges. Most material solutions ask the world to rebuild its infrastructure first. SPTek ECLIPSE® asks for one percent.
Whatever the judges decide this week, the meaning is the same. Smart Plastic is being taken seriously, on the main stage of sustainable business, as a materials company with science behind it and product in the market. That is how a new standard takes hold: not by shouting louder than the incumbents, but by showing buyers and partners that a better end-of-life outcome is available today, at almost no added cost.
To everyone who voted, shared, and believed plastic should be engineered with its full lifecycle in mind: thank you. You helped get us here.
If you are at Trellis Impact 26, watch the Startups to Watch Finale on the Startup Day Mainstage Wednesday morning, and come find Suma and Yaman afterward. Let’s build a smarter standard together.
Smart Plastic Technologies develops materials solutions designed to improve plastic end-of-life outcomes. Its platform, including SPTek ECLIPSE®, is built to work with conventional polyolefins (PE and PP) while supporting a more responsible path when plastic is not recovered. Learn more at changetheplastic.com.
A plain-language guide to SPTek ECLIPSE® technology — changetheplastic.com
The Problem
More than 90% of plastic ever produced has never been recycled. It does not disappear. It simply accumulates in landfills, oceans, soils, and eventually inside living organisms. Conventional plastic can persist for hundreds of years without any meaningful change to its molecular structure.
The global plastics industry has long recognized this problem, and numerous technologies have been proposed as solutions. Two of the most commonly discussed are biodegradation and oxo-degradation. Both are widely marketed. Both fall critically short of solving the problem. Understanding why requires a clear-eyed look at what each process actually does at the molecular level, and what it leaves behind.
Technology One
The word "biodegradable" sounds reassuring. In everyday language, it implies that something will naturally break down and return harmlessly to the earth. For materials like food scraps, paper, or wood, this is essentially true. For conventional plastic, it is far more complicated.
Biodegradation is a process in which microorganisms, primarily bacteria and fungi, break down organic material into simpler compounds. When it works fully, the end products are carbon dioxide (CO₂), water, and biomass, leaving nothing harmful behind. The critical qualifier is when it works fully.
Conventional polyolefins, the plastics used to make most everyday products including polyethylene (PE) shopping bags and polypropylene (PP) food containers, are hydrophobic. Their surface actively repels water, which means microorganisms cannot access the carbon bonds that hold the polymer chains together. Without that access, biodegradation stalls or never begins at all. Microbial activity requires bioavailability. Standard plastic does not offer it.[1]
The fundamental flaw of most biodegradation claims for plastic: Microbes can only consume what they can physically access. Conventional plastic is molecularly hostile to the organisms that would otherwise break it down. Without chemical modification, biodegradation of polyolefins is negligible under real-world conditions.
Additionally, many plastics marketed as "biodegradable" require highly specific, controlled conditions to degrade at all. Polylactic acid (PLA) and polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), for example, are bio-based plastics that can biodegrade, but only in industrial composting facilities operating at elevated temperatures with managed microbial populations. In a landfill, a field, or an ocean, they behave like conventional plastic and persist for years or decades.[2]
Technology Two
Oxo-degradation works by incorporating metal salt compounds into the plastic during manufacturing. These compounds act as pro-oxidants. When exposed to UV light, heat, or oxygen in the environment, they trigger a chain reaction that cleaves the long polymer chains into shorter fragments. On the surface, this looks like progress: the large plastic item physically disappears.
But here is the critical problem: fragmentation is not the same as mineralization. The process produces enormous quantities of very small plastic particles. These particles, at first visible and then microscopic, do not disappear into the environment. They become microplastics and, eventually, nanoplastics. The molecule has been broken into pieces but never consumed. The carbon is still there. The plastic is still there. It is simply too small to see.[3]
Microplastics have been detected in human blood, breast milk, lung tissue, and the placentas of unborn children. They have been found on the peak of Mount Everest and in the deepest ocean trenches. Once plastic fragments to this scale, retrieval is technically impossible. Oxo-degradation accelerates the creation of microplastics; it does not prevent it. The European Union recognized this reality and banned oxo-degradable plastics under Directive 2019/904 (the Single-Use Plastics Directive) specifically because the technology creates microplastic pollution rather than resolving it.[4]
This is not a minor regulatory technicality. It is a fundamental scientific indictment of the technology. Any product or additive that causes plastic to fragment without ensuring complete molecular consumption by living organisms is not a solution to plastic pollution. It is a redistribution of it.
The SPTek ECLIPSE® Difference
Bio-assimilation is a fundamentally different outcome. It is not fragmentation. It is not partial breakdown. It is the complete conversion of the plastic's carbon into carbon dioxide, water, and biomass by living microorganisms. Nothing biologically harmful remains.
SPTek ECLIPSE® achieves bio-assimilation through a precisely engineered, two-stage process. The science behind it is validated by independent laboratories including Smithers, Intertek, LMPE Italy, TCKT Austria, and SEVAR France, and it is supported by isotopic tracer testing that proves with chemical certainty what is happening at the molecular level.[5]
The distinction between Stage 2 and Stage 3 is where ECLIPSE® diverges fundamentally from oxo-degradation. Oxo-degradation stops at Stage 2. The polymer is fragmented but not consumed. ECLIPSE® is specifically engineered to move through Stage 2 and complete Stage 3 fully. The additive does not merely break the plastic apart. It prepares the material for biological consumption and ensures that consumption actually occurs.[6]
Side by Side
Precision Matters
The term "biodegradable" has been so broadly and loosely applied across the plastics industry that it has effectively lost meaning. Products have been labeled biodegradable that only degrade under industrial conditions, that leave behind microplastic fragments, or that simply have no credible testing to support the claim. Regulators in the EU, the UK, and the United States have all moved to restrict or scrutinize the term.[4]
Smart Plastic Technologies uses the term bio-assimilation because it describes a specific, testable, and validated outcome: the biological consumption of the plastic's carbon by living organisms, resulting in complete molecular conversion and no residue. This is not merely better marketing language. It is a scientifically precise description of a process that has been independently verified through isotope tracing, anaerobic digestion testing, UV-thermal aging studies, and long-duration respirometry assays conducted between 2016 and 2024 across multiple laboratories on three continents.[5]
Key technical distinction approved by Smart Plastic Technologies: "The generation of microplastics is a required phase in the journey towards complete bio-assimilation. SPTek ECLIPSE® proprietary technology enables completion of full bio-assimilation beyond the microplastics stage." This is the critical threshold no competitor has cleared.
No other additive-based technology currently on the market has demonstrated, through C-13 isotope tracing, complete microbial consumption of polyolefin carbon across aerobic and anaerobic environments without requiring infrastructure change, cost premium, or performance compromise. That is the scientific foundation of the ECLIPSE® claim, and it is why the language is used with precision and backed by a complete evidence file available at changetheplastic.com/science.[6]
Trellis’s annual list goes beyond a simple shoutout. Selected startups get profiled on Trellis.net, pitch in webinars to climate executives and investors, and compete for Startup of the Year at Trellis Impact 26 in San Francisco.
Smart Plastic Technologies is honored to be selected as one of Trellis’s 15 Climate Tech Startups to Watch in 2026. This recognition highlights early-stage innovators in categories like material innovation, where Smart Plastic fits perfectly with our SPTek ECLIPSE® platform.
Trellis’s annual list goes beyond a simple shoutout. Selected startups get profiled on Trellis.net, pitch in webinars to climate executives and investors, and compete for a shot at 'Startup of the Year' at Trellis Impact 26 in San Francisco. Community voting helps determine finalists at the May 27 webinar pitches, creating real momentum for deployment-ready solutions like Smart Plastic's ECLIPSE®.
For climate tech, this visibility accelerates partnerships with operators, buyers, and funders who prioritize traction over hype. It is especially timely as investors wrote $40.5B in checks to proven climate startups last year.
Plastic has revolutionized packaging, agriculture, and consumer goods, but recovery rates reveal a stark reality: most plastic escapes current systems. Recycling is essential but insufficient on its own. That is where permanent pollution risk grows.
Smart Plastic was founded on a simple belief: plastic should not become permanent pollution. Our SPTek ECLIPSE® additive is designed to work with conventional polyolefins (PE and PP), preserving performance and recyclability during use (timed and programmable) while supporting a better end-of-life outcome if recovery fails. Independent testing validates this approach across marine, terrestrial, and anaerobic landfill environments, with no microplastic residue.
Unlike solutions demanding infrastructure overhauls, ECLIPSE® is a drop-in additive at 1% inclusion — no retooling, FDA-compliant (GRAS), and compatible with existing extrusion processes. It addresses the gap in polyolefin packaging like stretch film, bags, and agricultural mulch, where leakage is common.
This practical design makes it deployable now, aligning with Trellis’s focus on Seed-to-Series A companies with real traction. Our $1.1M+ in sales through Q1 2026 and partnerships like Sigma Plastics prove the model works.
Public support shapes the finalists announced in May, setting up webinar pitches and a shot at Trellis Impact 26. If you believe plastic should be engineered with its full lifecycle in mind — performance first, then a responsible end — we'd sincerely appreciate your vote for Smart Plastic!
Thank you for supporting climate tech that is science-led, operationally realistic, and ready to scale. Let’s build a smarter standard together.
Smart Plastic Technologies develops materials solutions designed to improve plastic end-of-life outcomes. Its platform, including SPTek ECLIPSE®, is built to work with conventional polyolefins while supporting a more responsible path when plastic is not recovered. Learn more at changetheplastic.com.
The global disconnect around plastic end-of-life isn’t a failure of awareness. It’s a failure of system design.
Over the past decade, the burden of solving the plastic problem has been placed on individuals: recycle more, choose better, avoid single-use wherever possible. Yet, plastic production continues to rise, and waste systems continue to fall short.
That disconnect isn’t a failure of awareness. It’s a failure of system design.
Much of our current approach depends on a simple assumption: if consumers do the “right” thing by recycling or composting materials, the system will work. But globally, only about 9% of plastic is actually recycled, highlighting the limits of downstream solutions alone.
Recycling systems are constrained by economics, contamination, and inconsistent infrastructure. Compostable materials depend on facilities that don’t exist in many regions. Even well-labeled packaging often ends up in the wrong wastestream.
We’ve designed solutions that depend on ideal conditions and placed them into systems that are anything but ideal.
The scale of the issue makes this even clearer. More than 350 million tons of plastic are produced annually, and two-thirds become waste within five years or less. This is not just a waste management problem, it’s a throughput problem.
We’ve optimized for speed, cost, and convenience, but not for recovery. Even when waste is collected, a significant portion is not recycled. In packaging — the largest source of plastic waste — much of what is collected still ends up in landfills or incineration due to technical and economic barriers.
Much of today’s response focuses on what happens after plastic becomes waste: recycling, recovery systems, and even offset mechanisms like plastic credits. These efforts are important, but they are inherently limited. They depend on infrastructure that is inconsistent and underdeveloped, economics that are often unfavorable, and human behavior that is difficult to standardize at scale.
As a result, even well-designed materials frequently fail to achieve their intended outcomes. By the time plastic reaches the waste stage, the conditions for success have already been constrained. Managing waste is necessary, but it cannot, on its own, solve a system that was not designed for recovery in the first place.
But a shift is coming. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which requires producers to take accountability for packaging after use, is rapidly becoming central to global policy and circularity efforts. Already, dozens of jurisdictions worldwide are implementing or developing EPR frameworks, fundamentally shifting accountability upstream.
The question is no longer just: Is this recyclable?
It is now: What actually happens to this material in the real world — and who is responsible for that outcome?
End-of-life is no longer a secondary consideration. It is becoming a design constraint.
Plastic is often framed as the problem itself. And I wholeheartedly agree that reducing unnecessary plastic use is critical. But plastic didn’t become dominant by accident; it persists because it works within global supply chains, food systems, and cost structures.
It is lightweight, durable, cost-effective, and highly adaptable. It fits the system we’ve built. Even global institutions recognize this duality: plastic is deeply embedded in modern economies, even as its environmental impacts accelerate.
Which raises a more useful question:
If plastic is a problem, what does that say about the system that made it indispensable?
At the same time, emerging solutions like reuse, while promising, face their own constraints. Scaling reuse systems depends heavily on infrastructure development and cost competitiveness, which are still evolving.
We are still trying to solve the problem after the fact, rather than addressing how materials behave within real-world systems from the start.
If responsibility is shifting upstream, and systems remain imperfect, then the bar for solutions must change. It is no longer enough for materials to perform well in theory. They must perform in reality.
That means accounting for incomplete infrastructure, inconsistent behavior, leakage across waste streams, and economic constraints.
As regulatory pressure increases and margins tighten across the packaging industry, solutions that cannot meet cost, performance, and system constraints will struggle to scale.
If we continue to rely on downstream behavior to solve an upstream design problem, we will continue to fall short.
This is where the conversation is evolving — from intention to outcome, from design to accountability, from recyclability to real-world performance.
The real challenge is building systems, and solutions, that work as they are today, while moving us toward something better.
The goal isn’t just to eliminate plastic. It’s to build a world where we no longer depend on it in the ways we do today. That will require reducing unnecessary material use, accelerating viable alternatives, investing in infrastructure, and designing materials that align with real-world conditions.
Because until systems, incentives, policy, and design are aligned, we’re not solving the plastic problem. We’re just managing its symptoms.
Sources:
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/tipping-point-year-for-reusable-packaging-systems/
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2025/12/breaking-the-plastic-wave-2025
Tim Murtaugh founded Smart Plastic Technologies on the belief that plastic did not have to become permanent pollution. He gave that belief a company, a science, and a team willing to fight for it.
Tim passed away suddenly on March 17, 2026.
There are founders who build companies, and there are founders who build cultures. Tim understood that the two are not separate projects. He knew that a mission as serious as changing how the world thinks about plastic would require more than good science. It would require people who trusted each other, who could disagree with respect and civility, and who came back the next morning ready to try again.
That is the company he built. And that is the company that will carry his work forward.
Tim was a serial entrepreneur. He grew up in upstate New York and spent a good part of his childhood in foster homes. He knew adversity, and it was likely in this crucible that his unquenchable fire for life and people was born. He knew he was meant to do important work, and he did, founding a beloved non-profit ministry for boys and a successful real estate development company, among others.
Tim was not interested in noise. He believed in precision: in claims that could be defended, in science that could be verified, in promises to customers and investors that could actually be kept. He pushed the team not to be louder, but to be more honest and more rigorous. In a market full of easy shortcuts and greenwashed language, that discipline was his signature.
He mentored the people around him without making it feel like mentorship. He asked questions when most leaders would have given answers. He listened when most people would have moved on. He was tough when he needed to be but always fair, with a ready smile and a bright outlook. He was a glass half full kind of guy.
The mission he founded Smart Plastic Technologies to pursue has not changed. If anything, it matters more now. We will honor him by seeing it through.
To Tim’s family:
We are grateful for every minute he gave to this team and to this work, and we are profoundly sorry for your loss. Tim’s name and his way of leading will remain a part of us and of this company for as long as it stands.
The Smart Plastic Technologies Team
March 2026
For over 70 years, plastic hasn't evolved. Now, with SPTek ECLIPSE®, Smart Plastic Technologies has introduced a 1% drop-in additive for polyolefins that preserves performance and processing, stays compatible with recycling pre-activation, and adds an end-of-life safety net.
Click here to see our latest video describing how SPTek ECLIPSE® is The Last Plastic.
https://youtu.be/yvTYkC4nL_8?si=c8GWqlhzGzuY2jXZ
This is a plastic bag. Simple. Useful. Disposable. And part of the 400 million tons of plastic produced every year.
Globally, less than 10% is recycled — polluting our land and water… our food supply… even our bodies. So, we created a failsafe for when plastic ends up in our environment.It’s called Smart Plastic – and it’s designed to disappear on purpose.Here’s how it works: Our SPTek ECLIPSE® additive gives plastic a functional life span.
180 days… 24 months… 7 years… Manufacturers decide based on the product — with no changes to machinery, no new equipment, no disruption.
When a product’s useful life is over — whether it ends up in sunlight, soil, landfill, or ocean, heat and humidity trigger the programmed transformation.
Long polymer chains fracture into shorter segments. But unlike other so-called “degradables” that leave behind microplastics, Smart Plastic keeps going… reducing segments to a size small enough for microbes to recognize as food… converting the plastic into water… CO₂… and biomass — the same material all living organisms are made from. No toxins. No microplastics. No greenwashing.
And this isn’t just theory. We’re proving it every day.
We’re adding ECLIPSE® to industrial stretch film… medical device packaging and surgical gowns… agricultural mulch film… food packaging and straws… and the grocery bags holding your produce. And that’s just the beginning. Plastic hasn’t evolved in 70 years. Now is the time. Across industries and applications, Smart Plastic is reshaping what plastic can be.Proven chemistry. Predictable performance. A cleaner planet.
This is the new Smart Standard™. SPTek ECLIPSE® by Smart Plastic. Plastic that Disappears on Purpose. changetheplastic.com
