ReVentas Turned an EIC Accelerator Grant Into a Recycling Pilot

Impact Plastic Processing Limited was incorporated in Grangemouth, Scotland, on 12 May 2020, seven days before the EIC Accelerator pilot's Green Deal cut-off of 19 May 2020, according to Companies House. The European Commission's list of selected companies for that round names it once, with no partner company, for a grant-only project called PolyChrome. Six months later the company renamed itself ReVentas Limited. Its project, which ran from January 2021 to February 2023, received an EU contribution of €1,541,984.50 towards a total cost of €2,202,835, according to CORDIS.

The promise was a solvent process that strips all pigments and additives from mixed polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) waste and turns it into "a clear virgin-like pellet suitable for food grade use". ReVentas built the pilot plant and is still in business, with 24 staff and fresh investors. It has no reported revenue, and the commercial plant its EU report said would run in 2026 is now scheduled for commissioning in the fourth quarter of 2028.

Where ReVentas Stands Now

ReVentas is active. Companies House lists it as an active private company with accounts filed up to 31 December 2025 and a confirmation statement dated 14 August 2026, and it registered share allotments in February and July 2026, according to its filing history. No charges and no insolvency filings are registered.

The news flow in 2026 is steady. In June the company signed an engineering and licensing alliance with KBR, the Houston-based engineering group, which will support global licensing, engineering and scale-up of the process, according to RECOUP and letsrecycle.com. No financial terms were published. In July Scottish Enterprise awarded a £3.5 million research grant towards a £9 million, three-year project to expand the Livingston pilot plant for harder waste such as food packaging films, according to Packaging Scotland and the company. Later that month ReVentas said it had joined HG2030, a European brands consortium, to demonstrate rigid PP food packaging made from post-consumer waste.

The web address the company gave the Commission in 2020, scottishplasticrecycling.org, belonged to the Scottish Plastic Recycling Centre of Excellence, an initiative of the Grangemouth testing firm Impact Solutions, according to an archived copy from August 2020. The domain now carries an Indonesian-language blog. ReVentas uses reventas.co.uk.

A Spin-Out of a Testing Laboratory

The company grew out of the Impact group. Four of its six first directors, Kevin Ross, Andrew Burns, Gregg Falconer and Les Rose, also sit on the board of Impact Laboratories Limited, which is registered at the same Livingston address, according to the ReVentas and Impact Laboratories officer lists. The 2021 and 2022 accounts record money owed to Impact Laboratories as a related party. Kevin Ross and Tom Rose were each registered as holding between 25% and 50% of the shares until 16 April 2025, according to the register of persons with significant control.

PolyChrome was not funded by the EU alone. In May 2020 the UK's Circular Plastics Flagship Projects competition, run by WRAP with UK Research and Innovation, awarded £229,525 to Impact Solutions and the Scottish Plastic Recycling Centre of Excellence for a PolyChrome demonstration unit and a techno-economic study to design a full-scale pilot, according to WRAP and Packaging Scotland.

The Technology: Dissolve, Filter, Precipitate

Plastics are hard to reuse in high-value applications such as packaging "due to high levels of contamination", the project's CORDIS report says, and only around 5% of the plastic collected in the EU is reused in packaging. PolyChrome dissolves the waste in solvents, filters out "any pigments, additives and chemical contamination" and then precipitates selected molecular weights so that the output can be tailored to different uses, the CORDIS objective says. The company said its solvents could be reused more than 100 times. The Institution of Chemical Engineers describes the process as removing additives and contaminants while keeping the polymer chain intact, according to its partner page.

ReVentas now describes a five-step process of shredding, dissolution, filtration, polymer recovery and pelletising, running at low temperature and pressure, and claims an 80% reduction in carbon emissions against virgin plastic, according to its website and Packaging Scotland. No independent life-cycle assessment of that figure could be found.

What PolyChrome Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 1 December 2020 under the Green Deal topic of the EIC Accelerator pilot, and the project closed on schedule on 28 February 2023. The final periodic report says designs for a pilot plant were completed in 2021 and 2022 and the plant was built in 2022 and 2023 at the company's site in Livingston. It says runs of commercial post-consumer feedstock "proven the commercial feasibility" of the process and that end users wanted the product, and that ReVentas had secured funding to start front-end engineering design in the second quarter of 2023 for a 10,000-tonne-a-year plant "planned to be operational in 2026". The results page lists three patent applications filed on 25 August 2021 and one public deliverable, an open-days and client-trial list.

1. Optimise and pilot the processDeliveredPilot plant built in Livingston, per the CORDIS report; still in use and being expanded in 2026.
2. Protect the technologyDeliveredThree patent applications in August 2021, per CORDIS.
3. Grades tuned to end usesPartialCompany reports converter trials in blow moulding, injection moulding and BOPP film; no named customer or independent test.
4. Food-grade pelletNot achievedNo food-contact approval or food packaging customer announced; HG2030 demonstration only began in July 2026.
5. 10,000-tonne plant by 2026MissedCommissioning now scheduled for Q4 2028, per letsrecycle.com.

For a 26-month grant, the core deliverable, a working pilot plant, was met on time. The claim that set PolyChrome apart, food-grade recycled PE and PP, has not been demonstrated publicly three and a half years after the project ended. In February 2026 the company said it had turned coloured HDPE from bottle caps into "a pure, colourless blow-mould grade HDPE suitable for manufacturing new bottles", and in March 2026 that it had stretched transparent BOPP film with 35% and 50% recycled content in trials with an unnamed film converter, according to its cap-to-bottle and BOPP announcements. Neither result has been confirmed by a partner or a third party.

What ReVentas Has Achieved Since the Award

The main achievement after the EU project is private money. In May 2025 ReVentas closed a Series A round of undisclosed size backed by Orlen VC, the venture arm of the Polish energy group, Beiersdorf Venture Capital and Scottish Enterprise, with the two corporate investors joining LG Chem and others as strategic partners, according to Packaging Scotland, Scottish Financial News and Packaging Gateway. Scottish Enterprise had previously invested £2 million in the company, according to the July 2026 grant announcements. The round coincided with a reshaped company: on 16 April 2025 shares were allotted, six directors left the board, a Warsaw-based director, Konrad Wysmułek, joined, and the founders ceased to be registered as controlling shareholders, according to the filing history.

The capacity targets moved with each announcement, and the reports do not agree. In May 2025 Packaging Scotland and Scottish Financial News reported a 10,000-tonne plant in 2027 plus 140,000 further tonnes by 2031, while Packaging Gateway reported 40,000 tonnes by 2031. In June 2026 the KBR announcement gave Q4 2028 for commissioning of the first plant, which will make recycled HDPE, and more than 750,000 tonnes of capacity by 2036. Where that first plant will be built has not been published.

The team kept growing through the lean years. Average staff rose from 6 in 2020 to 22 in 2024 and 24 in the second half of 2025, according to the filed accounts. The Institution of Chemical Engineers, which lists ReVentas as an employer partner, describes it as a pre-revenue start-up with about 30 engineers and scientists, according to its partner page.

The Money

ReVentas files small-company accounts without a profit and loss account, so revenue and annual losses are not public. The balance sheets show the shape of the business. The 2021 accounts state the company was "in the research phase and currently pre-turnover", and every later set describes it as "in the research phase of its life cycle". Accumulated losses grew from £27,723 at the end of 2020 to £2.03 million at the end of 2024, when the company had net liabilities of £2,027,822 and £151,641 in the bank. Long-term creditors had risen to £2.06 million; in December 2022 the company had issued £500,000 of convertible loan notes at 8% interest.

The 2025 share issue reset the balance sheet. At 30 June 2025 the company reported share premium of £4,146,495, cash of £2,749,605 and net assets of £2,294,669, and long-term creditors had fallen to £525,585. Accumulated losses then rose by £1,351,982 in the six months to 31 December 2025, leaving net assets of £942,687 and cash of £1,508,808, according to the latest accounts. Further shares were allotted in February and July 2026; the amounts raised are not public.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, in force since 11 February 2025 and applying from 12 August 2026, according to the European Commission, requires plastic packaging to contain minimum shares of post-consumer recycled content from 2030. For contact-sensitive packaging made from plastics other than PET, such as PE and PP food packaging, the minimum is 10% by 2030 and 25% by 2040, under Article 7 of Regulation (EU) 2025/40. ReVentas says mechanical recycling leaves a large low-quality share of PP waste that cannot be brought to food grade, and that this is the material it aims to process, according to its HG2030 announcement. Orlen VC's president, Marek Garniewski, cited exactly that obligation and Europe's shortage of high-quality secondary raw materials when the Series A was announced.

There is a geographic twist. ReVentas is a British company whose EU grant was signed in December 2020, weeks before the Brexit transition period ended, and its process is now to be licensed worldwide with an American engineering firm. Whether its first plant will serve the EU market has not been disclosed.

The Verdict

ReVentas has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.