High-Risk, High-Reward: Investing in Game-Changing Plastics Extrusion Technology

Angel investors understand the high stakes of funding new technologies. The journey is fraught with financial, technical and market risks—but when a groundbreaking well-designed innovation meets the right market, the rewards can be nothing short of legendary.

For Braam Meij, one technology has the makings of such an opportunity. ReDeTec, a Toronto-based small business, has developed MixFlow, a filament extrusion system that promises a new way to melt plastics. Whereas traditional systems churn a screw through molten plastic, ReDeTec’s novel filament extrusion design separates the drive section and melt section with a thermal isolator, allowing independent control of temperature and pressure, explained Meij, CEO of BM3 Ventures Ltd., and an early-stage investor in the plastics extrusion system.

ReDeTec’s extrusion technology is game changing because it uses 50% less energy than competing systems and offers higher throughput and more automation, Meij said during a call to invite Machine Design to visit ReDeTec’s R&D facility in Toronto. “The solution has disruptive potential,” he touted.

What is the Difference Between Extrusion and Injection Molding?

Plastics extrusion is a high-efficiency, low-volume manufacturing process where raw plastic material is melted and shaped into a continuous profile by forcing it through an extrusion die. The process is widely used to produce continuous components or products, such as pipes, tubing, fencing, deck railings, window frames, plastic films, sheets, thermoplastic coatings and wire insulation.

Injection molding, by contrast, forms a part by injecting molten material into a mold. The process can handle a broader range of materials required to produce discrete products, such as automotive parts or bottle caps, and is associated with greater precision, complexity and tolerances than plastic extrusion processes.

ReDetec’s MixFlow technology is not only a new way to melt plastics but also a step up from extrusion, said Dennon Oosterman, ReDeTec’s founder and CEO. “What it really does differently is that it allows one to melt plastic without viscous shear,” he said.

In both cases, molten plastic is used to form an object. “In extrusion, parts are formed in a continuous profile; it goes forever,” Oosterman explained. “Whereas, with injection molding, you form it in the molds over and over and over again. Our technology provides the molten plastic that you then form. So, if you take our tech, you can either stick a die on it for the extrusion, or you can stick a clamp on it for injection molding. It is the portion of the machine that takes in room-temperature plastic and turns it into molten plastic to then be injected or extruded. That’s what we do.”

MixFlow is applicable to either industry, and it is ReDeTec’s goal is to encourage companies that manufacture equipment for both extrusion and injection molding markets to adopt the MixFlow technology, said Oosterman.

Test, Develop, Validate, Scale

With traditional plastic parts production processes, molten plastic is mixed around a long screw. The advantage of this method is that it ensures a consistent flow of molten plastic, which is needed for producing high-quality extruded products. The main drawback from energy efficiency perspective is the system’s limited adaptability and control capabilities.

Comparing extruders: A traditional extruder (top), where the screw (blue) interacts with the molten plastic for its entire length. MixFlow system (bottom), where the screw (pink) is fully separate from the melting zone (red/silver).

“You need full-time trained operators to run these machines,” Oosterman explained. “It’s a relatively intensive task. What MixFlow does differently is that it completely separates the screw or the feed auger from the plastic, and this allows us to have significant benefits in energy efficiency. [Add to that] the level of automation we’re able to achieve. And the quality of the plastic itself is notably higher. There’s less degradation from thermal and mechanical stress.”

ReDeTec’s extrusion of plastic materials patent covers a system where the auger feeds room-temperature plastic into a separate melting chamber that melts and mixes plastic uniformly without any interaction from the screw. The melting largely occurs through polymer shear or friction heating.

“Of course, there’s much more to the proprietary process to make it work," said Oosterman. “We figured the best IP protection strategy was both—we have the patent, and we have all the other techniques you’d have to figure out as well. So, you’d need to both crack the code and violate the patent to copy it.”

An “exploded view” of a MixFlow extruder, with the drive section in blue, the thermal insulator in yellow and the melt section in red.

In ReDeTec’s first pilot using a large extruder, their engineers ran four different polymers through the machine. Tests were confined to low-volume extrusion and focused on compounding. “We’ve done polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) and nylon, and we’ve run those with various additives, compounds, etc., all at very low-volume, almost lab-scale extrusion,” explained Oosterman.

Tests have ranged from 200 grams (0.44 lb.) of filament using a small extruder to about 2 kilograms (4.4 lb.) an hour, or 10 times the throughput in a scaled-up extruder. “We’re looking to scale that up to 20 kilograms (40.092 lb.) and then 200 kilograms (440.0925 lb.) an hour,” Oosterman said. “The initial pilot was to show that the technology works with a variety of both commodity plastics as well as engineering grade. It works in extrusion, and it works for compounding.”

Championing Circularity in Plastics

As industries become more conscientious of environmental issues, sustainability has become a crucial consideration in designing and processing parts. Accordingly, ReDeTec focuses on maximizing material use through plastics recycling and waste reduction, offering eco-friendly and cost-effective solutions that outperform current industry standards.

Whereas conventional systems degrade plastic every time it is extruded, MixFlow uses less energy and preserves plastic quality, reducing degradation to 1% or less and yields stronger filament, according to Oosterman.

: ReDeTec’s software “learns” a new plastic in real time. In this case, engineers provided ABS settings as a baseline, but the actual plastic being processed was HIPS. The green lines (dark green represents flow quality, and light green throughput). Both increase significantly as the system stabilizes and optimizes various settings for the new plastic.

In one study, ReDeTec’s R&D engineers 3D-printed plastic samples, conducted mechanical tests and then recycled the samples into filament using their ProtoCycler V3 filament extruder equipped with MixFlow extrusion technology. The engineers found that after three recycling cycles, the ultimate tensile strength and elastic modulus of thermoplastic samples (polylactide [PLA], ABS, HIPS [high impact polystyrene] and PP) remained relatively unchanged when recycled using the MixFlow technology.

ReDeTec has effectively demonstrated an approach that from an environmental standpoint reduces energy consumption, minimizes waste and decreases downtime, said Oosterman. “We really care about sustainability and the environment,” he said. Being able to slash the energy bills in an industry that consumes a huge amount of energy... is an important driver for us, and seeing intelligent mechanical systems perform incredible feats of engineering is something that gets the whole team out every morning. It’s a really exciting thing.”

We could hit 100% perfect and hit the absolute limits of physics with it, but that doesn’t make a difference if it’s not in plants around the world.
- Dennon Oosterman, CEO, ReDeTec

Still, Oosterman recognizes that what he perceives as his company’s greatest strength and what others care about are not necessarily aligned. “Personally, I think it’s great that we’ve done studies that show that we work better with recycled plastic than existing technology, but the industry doesn’t want to recycle plastic, and we’re not going to change that,” he said. “There are maybe 10 different problems with recycling right now, and we’re only solving one of them. The other nine are still there, so it’s a moot point.”

The plastics industry relies on energy to process raw materials into products. After raw materials, energy is typically the largest resource consumed in the industry, noted Oosterman. “We’ve reduced the amount of energy needed for these processes. Obviously, there are greenhouse gas benefits, but it’s just a more efficient system,” he said.

Redetec’s MixFlow system builds on traditional extrusion processes. The proprietary solution separates the screw or the feed auger from the plastic and offers significant benefits in energy efficiency.

If increasing production is prioritized over reducing energy consumption, efforts to promote energy-saving initiatives could encounter resistance. Oosterman believes that the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Because companies prioritize growing and building their business, ReDeTec’s go-to-market strategy highlights the potential to increase productivity for a given cost. This model embraces goals for longer-term success and materially better outcomes than traditional models. The pitch for MixFlow is: “Keep everything the same and produce more, increase output, gain a competitive edge.”

Despite improving the prototype’s overall performance this year, the company hasn’t had the resources to commercialize the technology. “We’re at the stage right now where we’ve demonstrated the technology’s worth and that it’s scalable, but all we’ve ever made are prototypes,” Oosterman said. “We could hit 100% perfect and hit the absolute limits of physics with it, but that doesn’t make a difference if it’s not in plants around the world.”

What ReDeTec needs, he said, is to find partners who will “take a bit of a risk, for sure,” and incorporate the technology into their manufacturing processes. The Catch-22 is that until they show evidence of traction in the industry, growth into industrial markets is likely to stall.

Staying Afloat with 3D Printing

ReDeTec, which bills itself online as an advanced plastics manufacturing company, started out as a 3D printing business about 11 years ago. The company has six employees, including four engineers and sales and marketing support. “We have an electrical engineer, a mechatronics engineer and a software control systems engineer,” said Oosterman, an engineering physicist who studied at Canada’s University of British Columbia. “What unites all of us in this business and in this drive is that we all really like seeing hands-on, tangible creation. People say, ‘hardware is hard,’ but it’s also exceptionally rewarding.”

As a small business, the company has had success with its flagship product, ProtoCycler V3, which empowered users to make their own filament for 3D printing, developed methods to recycle 3D printing waste and enables experimentation with the making of novel plastic filaments. This system is supported by ReDeTec’s automated software, which controls and monitors all extrusion parameters when working with polymers and additives.

For the most part, the 3D printing business is keeping the business afloat, and it wasn’t until five years ago that the company grew into the industrial market. “We’re an established small business in the printing space,” Oosterman said. “We’ve been around for about a decade shipping product. We’ve kept profitability. We’re not going to disappear, which means we’re no longer a startup on the industrial side.”

Innovating on the Shoulders of Industrial Giants

I read somewhere that location and urbanization influences are an important factor in the development of startups. ReDeTec’s R&D lab is located on Carlaw, a busy street in Toronto’s bustling urban East End. A collection of former factories and warehouses were built in the vicinity during the early 20th Century. Many were subsidiaries of their American parent companies, including Wrigley’s (chewing gum); Crown Cork and Seal (patented a machine for capping bottles and designed an aerosol can at this location); and the Jefferson Glass Co. (the factory made 35,000 glass lightbulbs a day by 1918, and was bought by The Acme Paper Box Co. in 1931).

Due to revitalization and redevelopment over the decades, the pedigree of the former industrial precinct is clinging to survival. The area is characterized by a mishmash of old and new architecture, all of which contribute to the now mixed-use developments where tenants are as likely to be accountants, artists, woodworkers and glass blowers as they are engineers and physicists.

Dennon Oosterman, CEO, ReDeTec, and Braam Meij, CEO, BM3 Ventures Ltd., discuss the pros and cons of designing and developing a plastics extrusion system.

ReDeTec is housed in a building that at one time was a toy factory and a munitions manufacturer at another. For Oosterman, however, future success depends much more on his long-term vision and mission and the value proposition of his team than the building in which it operates.

“We’re less concerned with having affordable real estate because we don’t have a huge factory pumping up massive equipment,” said Oosterman. “We are very concerned with accessibility to the brightest talent we can find. You know, recent grads from U of T, Queens, etc., most of whom live downtown and don’t own a car and take public transportation. Especially in our earlier years, when we were constantly meeting with different partners, business development groups, marketing agencies.”

Iterate, Build Traction, Grow

Both Meij and Oosterman had cleared the decks for the afternoon, but it wasn’t for Machine Design’s benefit alone. They had a scheduled board meeting later that afternoon.

During the early stages of development, regular meetings and feedback from board members are crucial for navigating business challenges and for soliciting support as the company proves out initial assumptions. Investors can choose to be hands-off or deeply involved through development.

People say, ‘hardware is hard,’ but it’s also exceptionally rewarding.
- Dennon Oosterman, CEO, ReDeTec

That day, Meij was ready to be hands-on. “Having better opportunities to recycle plastic, reducing the energy consumption and demonstrating automation and control in a totally different way to what has been done in the past was what was exciting for us,” Meij said. “Taking something that’s small and working well and then trying to industrialize that is a challenge and comes with exciting hurdles to overcome.”

By training an industrial engineer who shifted vocations after a 22-year career with a large industrial conglomerate, Meij fully appreciates the application potential of ReDeTec’s MixFlow technology. “We have the prototype, and we’ve done some great testing with good results,” he said. “There’s some tweaking that needs to be done, and we want to go bigger and get to a substantial-sized extrusion unit... Dennon and his team are the right partners to take on the industry a bit.”