UBQ is literally turning trash into treasure

Albert Douer wants your common household trash. To him and his company – UBQ Materials Ltd. –it’s not rubbish, it’s valuable feedstock.

Using its patented process, UBQ takes everyday garbage, strips out any abrasive metals, glass or minerals, and converts it into thermoplastic resins that be molded or extruded into a vast range of durable products. Such garbage is everywhere, hence the company’s name of UBQ, which stands for ubiquitous. It’s a global problem and requires a global perspective.

Born in Colombia, Douer is a resident of Panama and runs the 13-year-old, Tel Aviv, Israel-based UBQ. The firm just opened a commercial-scale plant in The Netherlands and its first U.S. office in Miami. It also recently struck a distribution deal in the U.K. and Ireland with Plastribution. He got his undergraduate economics degree at Harvard University and his graduate MBA in accounting and finance at The Wharton School.

Douer sees the United States as being an ideal location for one of its plants. “It’s a huge polymer consumer and has a waste problem.” UBQ also is looking closely at establishing operations in places such as the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Japan, Thailand and Australia, to name a few.

Douer explains his company’s general approach this way: “UBQ’s technology takes the organic content in municipal household waste and reduces it to its basic building blocks: sugars, ligaments, fibers, and cellulose. It then reconstitutes them into a proprietary matrix that covers the portion of waste that is not converted, including all the plastics. The key to our process is that the resulting composite material acts as a single homogenous material that can be replicated time and time again.”

“Historically,” Douer said, “we were a company with very few people for what we did.” UBQ had fewer than 40 employees until it began gearing up for commercial-scale production in The Netherlands. Now they employ closer to 140 people. Its full R&D team is based in Israel where the technology was developed. The firm only recently staffed up a full sales and technical service team –– in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Asia.

UBQ does not disclose its annual sales, but Douer acknowledges they still are very small. “We are very small for what we want to accomplish. This is a company where everyone in [it] knows, that probably we’re going to make money. We have a wonderful product.” He fully expects that in the  next year or two  UBQ will have “made it” financially.

“But that is not success at UBQ. ... If all we have in five years from now is 80,000 tonnes of capacity –– which is what we have today –– I will feel we have failed. If we want to fix the problems that UBQ fixes ... we have to build millions and millions of tonnes of UBQ capacity. If all we’ve done within five years is become rich, we will have failed. This is a company about fixing a problem, and that is how we will be measured as time goes by.” 

This drive to help address the problem of plastics waste helped to connect Teknor Apex and UBQ. The two firms, notes Douer, share some key values.

 Teknor is a family-owned business, celebrating its 100-year anniversary. In some ways, Teknor is much like UBQ, Douer said. “We don't look at things on a quarterly basis, we don't look at things a yearly basis, we're thinking about our grandchildren. Okay. From the minute we met ... that was the feeling, and that's why Teknor is so special for us.”

John Kaminsky, senior vice president of Teknor Apex, agrees. Noting that his firm began recycling PVC 50 years ago and has long been focused on minimizing waste, Kaminsky says of the relationship: “This gives us an opportunity to really triple and double and quadruple our impact on sustainability working with UBQ.

“We're in a rapid-learning, full-team-engagement, collaborative relationship with UBQ, where we're working through these opportunities, and understanding where we can help the world and win together. So both of our intentions are to grow and grow sustainably. For Teknor, it's continuing to develop expertise in formulating with UBQ materials.”

But even more importantly, he said, it’s understanding the application space and how to potentially make adjustments to help customers be successful and be able to use more and more UBQ. It’s vital to continue to deliver performance while also meeting sustainability goals. 

Douer reflected on the start of UBQ 13 years ago, based on a set of patents developed in laboratories in Israel. Douer joined as the first big investor after he was approached by Tato Bigio, one of the co-founders. Referring to Gil Felus, UBQ’s chief innovation officer and chief operating officer for the past decade, Douer said: “We come from the chemical world. So, from the very first day that UBQ started, it was thought of as an industrial company. It wasn't thought of as a university experiment.”

The UBQ team worked for years, refining their processes and getting key environmental approvals and certifications for their materials –– before they ever went to market. Today, many retailers, brands and OEMs are more keen than ever to advance their sustainability and circularity credentials.

The result is a diverse swath of more than 40 products made with UBQ-brand materials. These spanned four industries –– consumer durables, building and construction, automotive, and supply chain and logistics. Customers include companies such as McDonald’s, PepsiCo and Mercedes Benz.

The products displayed ranged from cocktail tables and rotomolded garden furniture to household goods, lamp fixtures and car parts. Douer says his firm has even found a way to include 20 percent of UBQ in polyethylene blown film.

Douer said: “I see a huge amount of plastic in the household goods industry switching to UBQ. I mean, a huge amount in things like outdoor sheds, in flower pots, in dog houses, chairs, tables” and various types of furniture.

Kaminsky said, “We are actively mining the marketplace for the intersection of where sustainability and interesting, valuable materials are coming together. And we're looking at those opportunities every day.”

UBQ gets its feedstock from a variety of sources. Douer says they particularly like household waste. “We also have an entire patent family having to do with vulcanized rubber from tires. Can you  imagine injection molding vulcanized rubber from tires? Well, we can do it.”

They also see a lot of potential with paper sludge. “People don't know what to do with those very short fibers that end up after you make carton or paper. ... Once it's semi-dry, we're able to use it in our process.”

Douer continued: “I tell people, this is something crazy, we formulate waste. Sounds like the craziest thing in the world. We can take waste from Amsterdam, which is different than the waste from Germany, and formulate it so that when Teknor gets their material, it's exactly what they were promised.”

This also involves dealing with the odor issue that typically plagues waste materials. This was a big problem in UBQ’s early days. But the firm has since found a way to deal with it.

“If you think about it, odor comes from the input,” Douer explained. “And the input in our case is heterogeneous. So it's not like you get the same odor all of the time. But today what I would tell you is most of the time when we have an odor problem, it usually is because the material is getting processed at the wrong temperature. It's burning. It’s not from the material itself.”

Everything has an odor, Kaminsky noted, and it needs to be managed. But UBQ, together with Teknor, has found ways to address this issue very effectively.

UBQ also strives to work with whatever existing waste infrastructure exists within a given region or country. “We don’t like reinventing the wheel,” Douer said.

In Europe, for example, there's a lot of RDF, or refuse-derived fuel –– essentially waste-to-energy operations, he noted. “What we do is we tap into that stream. Obviously, people prefer to make tables, chairs, car parts, than to burn things. ... And then in places like the U.S. we’re talking to different waste partners, the ones that already understand what the municipalities need, understand what all these people need. And we are resolving their end-of-life in a much nicer way than all those landfills.”

This boom in commercial interest and demand prompted UBQ to open its big new plant late last year in the Dutch city of Bergen op Zoom (BOZ).

“The Netherlands emerged as the perfect launchpad for UBQ’s global ambitions,” the company said, “primarily due to its strategic location and advanced waste ecosystem. In the face of regulatory challenges, UBQ adeptly secured community and government support by placing a strong emphasis on sourcing preprocessed waste materials and adhering rigorously to environmental standards.

The BOZ plant uses 104,600 tonnes of RDF from local waste processing partners and converts it into 80,000 tons of UBQ per year. They designed the system to be resource efficient, modular, and scalable, using multi-line layout capacity, enabling mass production and global expansion of UBQ. The plant has promised to create 130 full-time jobs, while also supporting the region’s transformation into a sustainable manufacturing hub while enhancing its recycling rates to comply with the state’s target.

But can UBQ compete on price? Douer says yes, absolutely. 

“If you formulate correctly, and you use UBQ correctly,” he says, “chances are extremely high that the end product will not cost more than whatever you're doing today. And you definitely do not need to change your entire capital equipment ... in order to start using UBQ, which is another huge advantage.

“So in UBQ, one of the things that we are very happy with is that we're going to be able to give sustainability to people without them having to pay a price for it –– so long as we formulate correctly, and we process it correctly. Again, the end product should not be costing more than the original.”

This all sounds very promising. Taking common household garbage and turning it into thermoplastic resin that can be processed using current equipment to produce quality, durable products –– all at an affordable price. But even so, Douer offers a point of caution:

“I just want to be very clear on this because sometimes it comes up. UBQ is not a silver bullet. It's a great product. It solves a lot of things. But there is no such thing as a silver bullet. Solving the world’s problems is going to take a lot of different people working on a lot of different things.”