Romanian start-up turns plastic and glass waste into a sustainable road material
In 2019, mechanical engineer Dennis Debie quit his day job in Romania in pursuit of a new challenge – ideally one that would help tackle climate change. “Given my skills, I wanted to give something new a try. In Romania, and elsewhere, I saw a lot of waste in landfills that couldn’t be recycled, especially plastic and glass,” he says.
On walks with his dog, Debie started picking up waste and experimenting with the collected materials in his kitchen, seeing what he could create. He aimed to produce construction materials in bulk, turning large amounts of waste into useful products. His first idea was concrete bricks, but this was quickly discarded as these would be difficult to recycle. So his attention switched to another area.
“I started thinking, ‘How can I improve roads?’ Asphalt is the most re-used material on the planet as it is made up of rocks and bitumen; the latter can be melted and re-used. However, the mineral aggregates required to build roads can be difficult and energy-intensive to retrieve, so I wondered if I could make asphalt more sustainable,” says Debie. After bringing in business partner Sebastian Tudose as a co-founder, and starting a lab in a garage with a shredder and oven – Littar was born. It became one of the projects of The Climate Change Company, which Debie founded to become an incubator for climate tech solutions.
Littar is an asphalt alternative for road construction made at conventional asphalt plants using shredded plastic and crushed glass. These materials – such as fibre optics, composites and window glass – are provided by local suppliers as aggregates. Once networks were in place to collect waste, The Climate Change Company found they had access to a substantial supply to work with.
Littar is used primarily in the foundational layer of asphalt as a base or binder layer in road structures. Compared to the mineral aggregates used in traditional asphalt, Littar reduces emissions up to 83 per cent and has led to a reduction of 11,000kg CO2eq to date. “We didn’t want to start a discussion of how plastics could be used in asphalt’s surface layer. Driving on a road where the top layer is plastic could be detrimental. For example, it could contribute to forest fires and the creation of microplastics,” Debie says.
Littar’s first commercial application recently took place in the city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where it was used as a parking lot foundation for the municipality. For this project, Littar upcycled the equivalent of 115,000 single-use plastic bottles and 10,000 glass wine bottles, mitigating seven tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
The Climate Change Company recently started working with the world’s largest producer of fibre optic cables, the Prysmian Group, in Romania. The company wanted a recycling solution that was more eco-friendly than the typical process, which involves burning them to produce cement. Following this collaboration, it was discovered that Littar can be made from the waste materials of these glass-and-plastic cables.
In the near future, The Climate Change Company will be working in Canada on a similar fibre optic project, in collaboration with the National Research Council Canada. Debie says, “It’s been interesting to work with the Canadian government, which understands that there is waste in every local area that could be better used. In future, we hope to do something similar in Romania, especially in rural areas with limited infrastructure. We’d love to use Littar on these roads.” The Climate Change Company is focused on developing multiple versions of Littar, each with varying amounts of glass and plastic, to maximise its potential applications.
As an engineer, the entrepreneurial start-up route has been a steep learning curve for Debie and his team: “We have learned step by step, but as we want to create a sustainable company, we know that growth has to be steady, making a change in CO2 reduction is more important to us than just making money. It’s a long road, but ultimately, we know we brought the correct materials with us.”
The Climate Change Company completed the Black Sea ClimAccelerator in 2022, funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. The start-up has since signed on Climate KIC as a strategic investor and joins our portfolio of nearly 60 climate start-ups. For more information on our accelerator programmes, visit our Climate Entrepreneurship page.