A Tale of Two Companies: The Next Step in Sustainable Batteries and Plastic Manufacturing
Aug. 1, 2024
Not many companies can bounce back from the death of its founder and a fire destroying its main facility in one week shortly before trying for its first round of fundraising. But e-Zinc, which raised $25 million in its Series A round in 2021, managed the feat.
Three years later, the company recently announced it had raised $31 million in its series A2 fundraising through new backers such as Evok Innovations and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, as well as existing shareholders, including Toyota Ventures and Graphite Ventures for its zinc-air battery.
Zinc may not be the first mineral that comes to mind when you think of renewable energy and batteries. But e-Zinc’s founder, Dr. Gregory X. Zhang, saw the element’s properties and believed it to be the perfect “energy carrier,” acting as both a fuel and an energy sink to simplify energy storage and release.
Zhang founded the company in 2012 with a mission to create a safer, more cost-effective energy storage solution using Zinc. Twelve years later, although he has passed, his dream lives on through the success of the zinc-air battery.
How Does It Work?
To sum it up, zinc metal pellets are formed on electrodes in the upper section of the battery cell while it is absorbing energy. The zinc metal deposits are then periodically wiped off from the charging electrodes, falling through the electrolyte onto the discharging electrode to be stored until needed.
When the battery discharges, air is injected into the cell, dissolving the zinc back into the electrolyte, which is then recirculated to the charging section for the next charging cycle.
What sets the battery apart? The answer is six-fold:
- Low cost: A combination of inexpensive commodity materials and the technology's decoupling of power from energy allows low-cost scaling of energy capacity.
- Flexibility and Scalability: The system is designed to last 10-100 hours. The company also uses a modular cell-based design that can scale from kW to MW.
- Safe: The system uses a nonflammable aqueous electrolyte with no risk of thermal runaway.
- 100% Depth of Discharge: The battery can be operated without harm, regardless of its state of charge.
- Long Lifetime: Low degradation leads to long product life.
- Sustainable and Ethical: Many of the aforementioned commodity materials used in the battery are recyclable or reusable.
What’s Next?
e-Zinc recently completed construction of its pilot facility, and executives expect the move there to be completed by Q4 2024. CEO James Larsen expects there to be a “significant boost in collaboration and productivity” with the entire team under one roof.
With a concrete workspace secured, the company’s next step is to produce its energy storage system capable of a first-of-a-kind 24-hour discharge duration and begin work on its next set of pilot projects, which includes works for the California Energy Commission and Toyota Tsusho. Also in the mix are field demonstrations of the technology manufacturing validation tests as e-Zinc looks to scale up with what Larsen called a “regional manufacturing model.”
“Third-party suppliers will manufacture the major components and sub-assemblies, and e-Zinc will conduct the final assembly, system integration and pack-out, factory acceptance testing, and delivery to the customer,” he said. “This is a capital-light model that leverages the existing manufacturing ecosystem in order for e-Zinc to scale up rapidly across regions.”
e-Zinc is just one of many long-haul clean manufacturing companies that are just now gaining public attention. London-based Symphony Environmental Technologies has plans to take the single-use plastics industry by storm with its biodegradable plastic technology.
A Long Road to Recognition
The company got its start in 1998 but was faced with what CEO Michael Laurier called “a lot of criticism.”
“They kept saying, ‘You cannot make plastic self-destruct.’ We spent five years arguing with the largest companies of the world saying, ‘Oh yes, you can.’”
Once they validated the technology, though, came more protests, largely based on misunderstanding how it worked: Destabilized landfills, destroyed recycling processes, and the impossibility of recycling biodegradable materials. Michael Laurier attributes the lack of understanding and visibility to why there hasn’t been more traction on the subject of biodegradable plastics as a whole.
“The more people that we engage with, the more people are saying, ‘Why isn't everybody aware of this?’ Everyone's going on about the issue [of single-use plastics], and there is a proven answer that's been around for decades. It's all about communication.”
So, how does biodegradable plastic work? In six steps:
- d2w biodegradable masterbatch is added during the plastic manufacturing process.
- A film containing the masterbatch is removed and converted into bags or packaging.
- The product behaves like conventional plastic during its intended service life.
- After its service life, the bag or packaging may be recycled.
- The d2w additive will take effect if left in an open environment, and the product will degrade in the presence of oxygen.
- The product will continuously biodegrade in an irreversible and unstoppable process until nothing but carbon dioxide, water, and biomass remains.
How fast the plastic degrades isn’t set in stone; according to Laurier, the timing can be played with when creating a batch, depending on what the plastic will be used for, using crop film as an example:
“Let's say we're making plastic to create crops under. We can design it to degrade in about sixteen weeks because it needs to be able to cover the comp for all of one or two seasons,” he said. “You put crop growing film over the crop, you need it to get better quality crop and to protect the crop, but ideally, you really do not want to be picking it up because nobody wants to reprocess it, and it's not really that recyclable at the end.”
If widely adopted, biodegradable plastics could be revolutionary, but Laurier estimates they’ve only penetrated “half of one percent” of the plastics industry. To him, the slow process has been because of a focus on banning plastic altogether because of pollution, which he doesn’t see the reason for with the new technology, which he calls “the best of the best,” and fossil fuel use.
The plastic manufacturing process isn’t completely green, but Laurier argues that it doesn’t contribute to the extraction of fossil fuels either, as it uses waste materials that would otherwise be burned.
We don't take oil out of the ground to make plastics,” he said. “It's a waste material, and that's what goes into plastic. That becomes good.”
What are the plans for when the world moves away from drilling for oil and gas? That day is a “long way away,” and Symphony is focused on mitigating the short-term impact.
“We're concerned with now. What steps could we take immediately to deal with the issue? This is a nondisruptive technology, somebody like Walmart, Costco could instruct every one of their manufacturers at one percent of this sort of formulation and the job is done […] Customers will see that [companies are] doing something about plastic pollution instead of the rubbish today saying ‘Well, we're now using paper bags!’ Which put out five times more CO2 and use more water to make and then charge your customers more for the privilege.”
Laurier is right, even if his exact numbers are off. Paper bags score slightly better on climate change impact compared to plastic bags when reused or incinerated, but they take 70% more air pollution and 50% more water pollution to produce.
In the even shorter term, he’s focused on getting the word out about biodegradable options and refining his current technology, just as the plastics industry has been doing for decades.
“It took many decades to make a plastic material and billions of dollars have been spent into refining it. When I first started, an ordinary garbage bag would be sixty to seventy microns, and we've managed to bring that down to something in the order of twenty microns without losing strength or optical and barrier properties. Now you’ve got a technology that can self-destruct if it ends up in the environment.
“What we need to communicate is you support the idea of plastics until another product comes in. I really want to get to a point where there is more interaction with the public so they can understand what we're trying to do about plastic pollution.”
