Latest / The Manufacturing Podcast with Fexingo: Factories, Supply Chains, and Industrial Business / How a Swiss Factory Is Making Printer Ink from Trash
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's a factory outside Zurich that's taking trash — the kind of mixed plastic waste that can't be recycled into new bottles or packaging — and turning it into printer ink. Luna: Printer ink? The stuff that costs more per gallon than crude oil? Lucas: Exactly that stuff. The company is called Xpress Ink, and they started production about eighteen months ago. Their facility processes roughly ten tons of mixed-waste plastic per day. The output is around three tons of what's called carbon black pigment — the same material that gives black ink its color. Luna: So the carbon from the plastic waste ends up as the pigment? Lucas: Right. The process is pyrolysis — you heat the plastic in a low-oxygen environment so it doesn't burn, it vaporizes. The vapor is then condensed into a crude oil, which gets refined into a very fine carbon powder. That powder is then milled and blended with solvents and binders to make ink. Luna: And the plastic they're using — what kind are we talking about? Lucas: That's actually the clever part. Most mechanical recycling — the kind that makes new bottles or film — requires relatively clean, single-polymer plastic. Xpress Ink takes the leftovers: mixed polypropylene, polyethylene, polystyrene, even some contaminated materials with food residue. The pyrolysis process doesn't care about the polymer mix because it breaks everything down to hydrocarbon molecules. Luna: So it's truly unrecyclable material by conventional standards. Lucas: Correct. And the economics are interesting. Their cost to produce a kilogram of carbon black is about one point five euros. The market price for virgin carbon black — made from crude oil — has been hovering around one euro eighty per kilo. So they're competitive on pure cost, but there's a premium angle too. Luna: The sustainability premium. Lucas: Exactly. A lot of corporate procurement now has carbon footprint targets for office supplies. If you're a big company buying ink for thousands of printers, switching to a recycled-source ink can reduce your scope three emissions. Xpress Ink claims their process emits about sixty percent less carbon dioxide per kilo of pigment compared to the conventional petroleum route. Luna: And does the ink quality hold up? I remember when recycled toner first came out, there were complaints about smudging and inconsistent density. Lucas: That's the technical hurdle. Printer ink requires extremely consistent particle size — typically in the range of fifty to two hundred nanometers. If the particles are too big, the ink clogs the print head. Too small, and the color intensity drops. Xpress Ink had to invest heavily in their milling and classification equipment to match the particle-size distribution of virgin carbon black. They've been shipping commercially for about a year now, and early customer feedback seems positive. Luna: Who's buying it? Lucas: Their biggest customer so far is a uk based cartridge refill company called GreenPrint. They sell remanufactured cartridges filled with Xpress Ink's product into about two thousand office supply stores across Europe. Xpress Ink also supplies ink directly to some Swiss government agencies and a couple of university print shops. Luna: Interesting. So it's not for consumer home printers yet — more institutional. Lucas: Right. The consumer market is harder because cartridge OEMs — HP, Canon, Epson — design their cartridges with proprietary chips that prevent refilling. But the refill and remanufactured cartridge market is actually quite large. It's roughly three billion dollars globally. And that market is eager for a sustainability story. Luna: So the feedstock is waste plastic that would otherwise go to incineration or landfill. The output replaces a petroleum-derived material. And the end product is cheaper or at least cost-competitive. That sounds like a pretty clean win. Lucas: It does. But there's a scale question. Xpress Ink's current facility processes ten tons per day. A typical European incinerator might burn five hundred tons per day. So to really dent the waste stream, they'd need to replicate this facility many times over. They're planning a second plant near Barcelona, targeting forty tons per day, but that's still a drop in the bucket. Luna: And the feedstock sourcing — is it reliable? Mixed waste plastic isn't exactly a scarce commodity, but the logistics of collecting, sorting, and transporting it to one facility have to be nontrivial. Lucas: That's the other constraint. Xpress Ink sources most of its plastic from municipal sorting centers within about a hundred kilometers of Zurich. They pay a small gate fee — basically they get paid to take the waste — which helps their unit economics. But expanding to new regions means building relationships with local waste management companies, which is slow and relationship-intensive. It's not a software business; it's a physical, logistical one. Luna: Still, if they can prove the model works at forty tons per day in Barcelona, that changes the conversation. And you mentioned the carbon black market — how big is that? Lucas: Global carbon black production is about fourteen million tons per year. About ten percent of that goes into inks and coatings. The rest goes into tires, rubber, plastics. So the addressable market for Xpress Ink's specific product is roughly one and a half million tons per year. Even if they capture one percent of that, that's fifteen thousand tons annually — way beyond their current capacity. Luna: And potentially they could also sell carbon black for tires and rubber if they refine it further. Lucas: That's the long-term plan. Their CTO mentioned in an interview that they're working on a grade suitable for tire manufacturing, which would open up a much larger market. But tire-grade carbon black requires even tighter specifications on particle size and surface chemistry. It's probably three to five years away for them. Luna: So ink is their beachhead. Lucas: Exactly. And it's a smart beachhead because ink commands a higher price per kilo than tire-grade carbon black. The margins are better, and customers are more willing to pay a green premium for something that sits on their desk versus something that goes inside a tire. Luna: Makes sense. Let me ask you this: is there any risk that the ink itself releases microplastics when printed on paper and later disposed of? Lucas: That's a good question. The pyrolysis process breaks the plastic polymers down to small hydrocarbon molecules, which are then reformed into carbon black — which is essentially pure carbon, not plastic. So the final pigment is chemically identical to conventional carbon black. It's not a polymer anymore. That said, the ink formulation still includes solvents and resins that could be plastic-based. But the pigment itself is inert. Luna: So the waste to ink pathway is genuinely circular, not just greenwashing. Lucas: The chemistry checks out. And the company has done life-cycle assessments that seem rigorous. They published the methodology online. You can quibble with assumptions — transportation distances, energy mix for the pyrolysis furnace — but the basic premise is sound. Luna: I want to pivot slightly. You know, we've been doing this podcast for a while now, and we've covered a lot of these circular manufacturing stories. I think it's worth mentioning that the reason we can dig into these details is that we don't have to rush to an ad break. Lucas: That's a fair point. We deliberately keep this show ad-free. It means we can spend ten minutes on the particle-size distribution of carbon black without someone cutting in to sell us meal kits. If you've gotten value from these conversations — maybe it's helped you think about a supply chain problem at work, or just satisfied some curiosity — the way to support that is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a small gesture that keeps this going without us having to chase sponsor dollars. And we really appreciate those who've chipped in. Lucas: Alright, back to Xpress Ink. One more angle I wanted to touch on: their competition. There are at least four other startups globally trying to make carbon black from waste tires or plastic. One in the US, one in India, one in the UK, and one in China. Luna: What differentiates Xpress Ink? Lucas: Most of those competitors start with tire-derived carbon black, which is easier because tire pyrolysis is a more established technology. But tire-derived carbon black typically has higher ash content and larger particle size, making it harder to use in high-end applications like ink. Xpress Ink specifically targets the high-purity segment from the start. That's harder, but it gives them a defensible niche. Luna: So they're playing the harder game but with higher margins. Lucas: Exactly. And if they succeed, they have a technological moat that's difficult to replicate because the process requires very precise control of temperature, residence time, and downstream classification. It's not just a commodity pyrolysis plant. Luna: Any sense of when they might be profitable? Lucas: They're not public, so we don't have financials. But the founder said in a recent trade press interview that the Zurich plant reached operating breakeven in the fourth quarter of last year. That's about fourteen months from start of production. For a first-of-a-kind chemical plant, that's actually pretty fast. Luna: That's encouraging. Do they have funding for the Barcelona expansion? Lucas: They raised a Series B round earlier this year, twenty-six million euros, led by a Swiss climate tech fund. That should cover the Barcelona plant and some R&D for the tire-grade carbon black. They also got a grant from the European Innovation Council, about five million euros. Luna: So the trajectory is there. It's early, but it's real. Lucas: It's one of those cases where the chemistry, the economics, and the waste stream all align. The question now is execution at scale. Can they replicate the process reliably in a new plant with a different waste supply? That's the test. Luna: And we'll keep an eye on Barcelona. Thanks, Lucas. Lucas: Thanks, Luna. That's it for this episode of The Manufacturing Podcast.