TUSTI Built an EIC Accelerator Greasy Plastic Plant and Went Bust

Almost half of the plastic collected for recycling ends up in the "mixed plastics" fraction, and much of it is coated in oil and food grease that standard washing lines cannot remove without hot water, steam or corrosive chemicals. That is how TUSTI, a Dutch recycler, described the problem in its final EU report: greasy mixed plastic is too expensive to clean, so it is burned or landfilled. TUSTI said it had solved this with a patented wash based on bio-based cleaning liquids that work at room temperature, and in the EIC Accelerator pilot's May 2020 Green Deal cut-off the European Commission backed it with a grant of €2,121,627.38, according to CORDIS.

The project, EGREMPLARE, closed on 31 March 2024 with a report that describes a factory hall in Montfort, in Dutch Limburg, and a processing line rated at 15,000 tonnes a year. On 13 December 2024 the district court of Limburg declared Tusti B.V. bankrupt, on the same day and with the same curator as its sister company Stiphout Plastics B.V., which ran the recycling plant next door, according to the insolvency records reproduced by faillissementsdossier.nl for TUSTI and for Stiphout Plastics.

Where TUSTI Stands Now

TUSTI is in bankruptcy. The Limburg court opened the proceedings on 13 December 2024 and appointed mr. D.A.J. Roomberg of Adelmeijer Hoyng Advocaten in Maastricht as curator; the bankruptcy was published on 16 December 2024, and the register's main activity code for the company is technical research and development, according to faillissementsdossier.nl. North Data lists the same insolvency publications and now adds Maastricht addresses, including the curator's PO box, to the company's record. The curator has filed ten progress and financial reports, the latest two on 8 September 2026, and the court replaced the supervising judge in January 2026, so the case was still open at the last update. The content of the reports, including the cause of the bankruptcy, the number of staff and what happened to TUSTI's assets and patents, could not be checked for this article: the reports sit behind a registration wall.

One register detail does not fit. The KvK extract shown by faillissementsdossier.nl gives a status of "opgeheven" (closed) dated 30 November 2022, yet TUSTI filed balance sheets for 2022 and 2023 in 2023 and 2024, according to North Data, and was declared bankrupt as a company in 2024. The extract does not say what was closed in 2022.

The company's website showed an unchanged homepage, inviting suppliers of greasy plastic waste and buyers of "clean, dry plastic regrind", in an archived copy from May 2026, seventeen months into the bankruptcy. By October 2026 the domain tusti.nl no longer resolved.

A Family Recycler and a University Spin-off

TUSTI was never a stand-alone start-up. Its own about page says it was founded in 2015 by Eindhoven University of Technology Holding together with the Stiphout companies (Stiphout Industries, Stip Recycling and Stiphout Plastics), with Jan Kolijn as CTO and Eline Stiphout, whose family had traded and recycled plastics for more than 30 years, as CEO. The university's news site Cursor called it a TU/e spin-off when it won the Gouden Kiem, the Dutch award for the best chemistry start-up, on 7 December 2016, which IO+ also reported.

The two companies shared a site. TUSTI's process page says it cleaned oily plastic by adapting "the 6000 ton/year industrial plastic washing/recycling line of Stiphout Plastics" at a waste disposal site in Montfort. In July 2023 the chemicals group LyondellBasell bought 50% of Stiphout Industries B.V., the parent of Stiphout Plastics, for an undisclosed price, according to the press release republished by Renewable Carbon and reported by EUWID. Neither source mentions TUSTI. The press release dates the founding of Stiphout Industries to 2015, while IO+ gives 2013. Whether TUSTI sat inside the group LyondellBasell bought into is not stated in any public source found; faillissementsdossier.nl lists it alongside Stiphout Plastics under Stiphout Industries B.V.

Stiphout Plastics, which employed around 30 people and had 18,000 tonnes of yearly capacity on three lines in 2023, went bankrupt the same day as TUSTI. Eline Stiphout told Dutch media that recyclate prices pushed down by cheap imports had brought the company to breaking point, and LyondellBasell said it was "disappointed by the current news", according to Modern Plastics India, citing Sustainable Plastics. An online auction titled "Faillissement Stiphout Plastics B.V. Montfort" closed on 24 April 2025, according to faillissementsdossier.nl; what it sold is not listed there.

The Technology: Degreasing at Room Temperature

Mechanical recyclers shred plastic packaging, wash it, separate it by density in water and dry the flakes. Grease and oil from food packaging survive a cold wash, so plants that take such waste use hot water, steam or caustic agents, which costs energy and can degrade the plastic, TUSTI argued in its CORDIS report. Its alternative was a cleaning liquid that dissolves the grease at room temperature and is then separated from water and oil so it can be reused, with the recovered oil sold to biofuel producers, according to the company's process description. The CORDIS objective claims this saves 60% of the energy of current cleaning processes; no independent measurement of that figure was found.

The chemistry is patented. TUSTI says it filed its first patent in August 2015, and IPqwery lists three patent families with Jan Kolijn as inventor, including US patent 11,819,886, "Non-corrosive process for cleaning a recyclable material", filed in March 2020 and granted on 21 November 2023. North Data lists the same patent titles from 2016, 2019 and 2020. What the curator has done with them is not public.

In that 2018 interview Kolijn said the Montfort plant was becoming too small and that TUSTI planned a new 10,000-tonne plant at a new location, financed in part by a new Rabobank loan, with oily plastic cleaning to begin in 2019. The capacity figures the company and its sister published over the years rarely line up.

What EGREMPLARE Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

EGREMPLARE was TUSTI's second EU grant under the name. In 2018 the SME Instrument paid €50,000 for a four-month Phase 1 feasibility study, whose CORDIS summary set the commercial target: "sales of 12,000 tonnes of plastic waste collected and over 10,000 of plastics recycled in the third year of commercialization, with revenues of more than 6 M€ by 2023." The company said it had invested more than €350,000 since 2015.

The Phase 2 grant followed in the EIC Accelerator pilot's 19 May 2020 Green Deal cut-off. The Commission's list of selected companies names TUSTI of Eindhoven, with www.tusti.nl, as a grant-only winner and lists no partner company for the project. The grant agreement was signed on 11 December 2020 and the project ran from 1 January 2021 to 31 March 2024, with TUSTI as sole beneficiary, according to CORDIS.

The plan, in the words of the final report, was "to build a demonstrating factory for the recycling of post-consumer household packaging in the Netherlands", in three phases: pilot tests, building the line, and external testing of the output by customers, plus a plan to spread the technology across Europe. The report says pilot tests ran on industrial samples from five suppliers in the Netherlands, Germany and France; the factory building was finished in June 2022; shortages of steel, copper and electronics forced a two-stage build, first for floating polyolefins and from 2023 for the sinking fraction (PET, PS, metals and stones); and the finished line could process 2.5 tonnes an hour, or 15,000 tonnes a year. It reports a material efficiency of 60 to 85% and says customers turned samples into tubes, bottles and keg parts.

What the report does not contain is any sales volume, named customer or revenue figure. Its last commercial step is that "together with LyondellBasell as a partner, the expansion of the EGREMPLARE technology to other recyclers in the network is discussed." No licence, second plant or LyondellBasell use of the technology has been announced by either company.

1. Pilot tests on industrial waste samplesDeliveredSamples from five suppliers in three countries, per the CORDIS report.
2. Demonstration factory in the NetherlandsSelf-reportedHall finished June 2022 and a 15,000 t/yr line installed, per the company's own report; no third party has reported on it.
3. Customer validation of the recyclatePartialSamples processed by unnamed potential customers; no supply contract announced.
4. 10,000 t recycled and over €6M revenue by 2023Not achievedNo volume or revenue published; bankrupt December 2024.
5. Roll-out to other recyclers in EuropeNot achievedOnly "discussed" with LyondellBasell at project end; nothing announced.

On the narrow question of whether the grant built something, the answer from the company's own report is yes: the line was installed within the 39-month project period. On the question the EIC Accelerator was meant to answer, whether the technology could stand as a business, the answer came nine months later in court.

The Money

TUSTI's EU funding totalled €2,171,627.38 across the two EGREMPLARE grants, according to CORDIS. It received no EIC equity: the award was grant only, and TUSTI does not appear among the 319 companies listed across the EIC Fund's portfolio pages checked for this article. Its other disclosed financing was the Rabobank loan for a new plant mentioned in 2018 and regional innovation funding for an earlier project, Arvina, from the Stimuleringsfonds MetropoolRegioEindhoven and REAP, according to the company's projects page; no equity round was found.

TUSTI filed balance sheets for 2022 and 2023, but their figures are only available through paid register services and could not be checked. How much of the EU grant was paid out, and whether the Commission has a claim in the bankruptcy, is not public.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's packaging rules now push directly at the waste stream TUSTI targeted. The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, has been in force since 11 February 2025 and applies from 12 August 2026; it aims to make all packaging on the EU market recyclable "in an economically viable way by 2030" and to increase the use of recycled plastics in packaging, according to the European Commission. A process that turns greasy mixed packaging into clean polyolefin and PET flakes would feed that demand, and the EGREMPLARE report presents the plant as a contribution to the Green Deal goal of "mobilising the industry for a clean and circular economy".

The economics went the other way. Stiphout Plastics was one of several Dutch recyclers to file for bankruptcy around the end of 2024, a list that also includes Blue Cycle, Vinylrecycling, Umincorp and Ioniqa, the chemical recycler with which TUSTI had run a test project in 2018, according to Modern Plastics India and IO+. The cause Eline Stiphout gave for her recycler's collapse, recyclate prices pushed down by cheap imports, is one a better washing process cannot fix.

The Verdict

TUSTI's curator, its founders and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.