The cleantech start-up UBQ Materials from Kibbutz Tze'elim has signed an agreement with the Motherson Group, under which the company will be provided with UBQ's innovative raw material, which works as an alternative to plastic, and will be produced using waste from Israeli residents.
Motherson, an Indian-Japanese partnership, is India's largest manufacturer of spare parts and a world leader in sales with $8.8 billion of revenue per year. The company has factories in 41 countries that manufacture a variety of spare parts for vehicles, including mirrors, electric cables and more.
According to the agreement, the Israeli raw material will be incorporated into the company's products as a substitute for plastic, in order to reduce the carbon footprint of the company's production processes.
The UBQ Materials plant operates the first technology of its kind in the world that manages to turn all types of waste – including food scraps and plants, various plastics, cartons, coronavirus masks and even dirty diapers – into useful raw materials, called thermoplastics, to create surfaces, trash cans, shopping carts, pipes, 3D printing material and many other products.
Due to UBQ's treatment of waste types that are currently not being recycled, each ton of raw material processed in the plant prevents about 12 tons of carbon emissions and toxic gases from being emitted into the air, and helps companies achieve their goals in the field of sustainability.
The largest manufacturers of plastic-based products in the world have been joining the trend of transitioning to using more environmentally friendly materials to ensure that they and their customers are able to meet the various and stringent environmental requirements in each country.
According to Jack "Tato" Bigio, co-founder and CEO of UBQ in Israel, the agreement with Motherson is a continuation of an earlier agreement that UBQ signed with the Daimler Corporation to integrate its material into Mercedes-Benz vehicles and trucks.
UBQ Materials currently is in the development and construction stages of factories in the United States and the Netherlands. UBQ's material has been certified by Quantis, the world's leading environmental impact assessment company, as the greenest thermoplastic material in the world.