traceless materials, a female-founded startup that developed a holistically sustainable alternative material for plastic, just received a €2.42 million grant and equity investment from the European Innovation Council (EIC). The funding will allow traceless to bring its novel naturally compostable biomaterial to market, substituting plastic and bioplastic in products that can easily end up in the environment – solving global plastic pollution.
In Europe, only 32.5% of plastic consumer waste is collected to be recycled. 43% of plastic waste in Europe is incinerated while another 25% is being landfilled. A big proportion of all plastic waste ends up in the environment, leading to extensive pollution of oceans and land. The negative impact of plastic on the environment results in an urgent need for alternatives. Novel material solutions which avoid plastic and microplastic from ending up in the environment are needed. Furthermore, the impact of these solutions on other urgent issues such as climate change, the global food problem, land-use change, or the environmentally sound management of hazardous chemicals need to be taken into consideration.
traceless materials were developed taking into consideration all impact indicators: The patent-pending technology invented by CEO and co-founder Dr. Anne Lamp allows the use of agricultural food production residues to produce materials that are home compostable.
While bio-based, traceless materials don’t cause land-use-change, don’t need any hazardous additives or solvents and have up to 87% lower CO2 emissions than conventional plastics. Using natural polymers that are neither chemically modified nor synthetically polymerized, they are expected not to fall under the EU Plastic Directive. And already competitive in quality, on industrial production scale traceless materials will even be price competitive to virgin plastic in the EU, making them a solution for people in all demographics and income levels.
traceless is applicable to a wide variety of products that can easily end up in the environment – from rigid and flexible packaging to disposables to products with high abrasion and coating & adhesive solutions. As it is fully home-compostable under natural composting conditions, with their first-of-a-kind material the company contributes to solving global plastic pollution.
Since its founding in September of 2020 traceless has been planning to bring their materials to market fast. The continuously growing team is developing several prototypes, among others an e-commerce shipping bag with OTTO, one of Europe’s biggest e-commerce companies.
Simultaneously, a successful seed investment allowed traceless materials to build its first pilot production plant to realize first market pilots. The startup will use the EIC funding to further accelerate its scale up through the building of a demonstration production plant which will enable a first market entry for traceless materials.
The EIC Accelerator supports individual Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to develop and scale up game-changing innovations. It’s the most competitive public funding scheme for deeptech startups at the moment. Of the 4,000 companies which sent in their ideas this year, only 65 winners got selected.
Dr. Anne Lamp, CEO of traceless materials, stated: “Receiving the EIC Accelerator support is a clear recognition of the innovative nature and high potential of traceless’ technology and the amazing work our team has done over the past year. The funding enables us to speed up our development even more and bring traceless to market fast – so that we can make our contribution to solve global plastic pollution!”
