When one thinks about the giant floating island of garbage, called the Great Pacific garbage patch, that sits roughly halfway between Seattle and Hawaii, you have to think there’s got to be a better way. It’s estimated to be approximately 80,000 tonnes, equivalent to roughly 500 Jumbo Jets, and contains an estimated total of 1.8 trillion plastic pieces. There is absolutely nothing good that can come from this, yet it continues to grow each year as more and more plastics are discarded into the environment.
One company that is working on finding a better way to deal with at least some of this plastic is oceansix future paths Ltd. (TSXV: OSIX | OTCQB: AKMYF). Oceansix is an environmental technology company that has developed an industrial process to recycle post-consumed polyethylene (plastic) bags. They have a vision of creating meaningful solutions, by constantly inventing ways of combining advanced technology with sustainable production and products from plastic waste.
The Company’s ‘waste-to-product’ process is able to use 100% highly contaminated plastic waste, and its products are produced in one step, directly from the contaminated plastic waste. This generates benefits from savings on labor, energy, machinery and transportation costs. The ‘waste-to-product’ process involves a single melting and cooling of post-consumed plastic waste, all performed in one facility, which results in the final recycled plastic product.
Oceansix constructed and developed a prototype manufacturing site in Isreal utilizing the Company’s ‘waste-to-product’ process and, to the Company’s satisfaction, demonstrated a real proof of concept for this process and its economic and environmental benefits and advantages. From here, the Company has expanded into the European target market. Along with the more conducive economic conditions for such production activity in Europe (such as governmental incentives, lower production costs, greater availability of post-consumed domestic plastic waste), the Company decided to take steps to move its production activities to Europe.
Part of the move to Europe included two acquisitions, including in January 2022 when, at the time K.B. Recycling Industries Ltd., entered into a share purchase agreement to purchase oceansix GmbH, a German company focused on developing technologies and product solutions. This was followed in April 2022, when the Company entered into an agreement to acquire 100% of the issued and outstanding shares of Plasticos Flome S.L., a plastics manufacturing company operating in Valencia, Spain. Flome’s Spanish production site has the capability to process hundreds of thousands of metric tons of boards and sheets into three dimensional plastic products.
Currently, the Company is focused on innovation development through its R&D operations in oceansix GmbH as well as sales of products through Flome. In addition, oceansix is exploring future solutions for generating recycled materials and further production of newly developed products, having made advancements including the development of production processes for expanded polyethylene (EPE) based products and die molding based products, thermoforming production trials, anti-slip geo-membranes, sheet based products welding techniques and injection molding production based products. This is all quite a mouthful, so if this interests you, I encourage you to visit their website for further insights as opposed to having me try to poorly explain what it all means.
oceansix is situated a long way away from the Great Pacific garbage patch, so they likely won’t be able to solve that problem anytime soon. However, the Company is working towards solving the problem of efficiently and effectively keeping plastic waste out of landfills and recycling that plastic waste into useful, in-demand products. We can hope they achieve the greatest of success going forward as that would truly benefit society.
oceansix future paths ltd. trades at a market cap of C$7.7 million.
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