Dimpora, a chemical company that develops sustainable and non-harmful membranes for apparel, is on a mission to create more sustainable alternatives for performance wear.

What are your milestones from 2021?

In 2021, we successfully closed our seed funding round of approximately $2.2 million in total––with Closed Loop Partners as one of the lead investors––to advance our circular membrane solutions. These membranes offer high performing waterproof, breathable and possibly biodegradable alternatives for outdoor wear, based on sustainable materials. With this increased capital, we also grew the company, moving the whole team into our own new offices. Within the year, dimpora also won the deVigier award, receiving additional funding to invest back in the growth of the company.

What is your vision moving forward? ?

Our vision is to put science at the service of nature and performance. We are pushing to globally scale dimpora eco pur, a 2D product that involves a conventional lamination of the dimpora membrane onto a textile, to replace fluorinated chemicals typically used in the textile market. For dimpora’s circular sane membrane products, the company aims to reach full production width in the beginning of 2022, laying the groundwork for initial clothing prototyping with partner brands.

HomeBiogas, a world leader in developing groundbreaking, simple-to-use biogas systems, continues to help people and businesses around the globe turn their organic waste into renewable energy and liquid bio-fertilizer on-site.

What are your milestones from 2021?

With funding to expedite our research & development and grow our team, we advanced two new major products: the Commercial System and the Premium System. The Commercial System reduces waste treatment costs through an onsite organic waste solution for large kitchens. The system also saves energy costs by producing hot water, resulting in reduced electricity use and GHG emissions. This year, we also established a working pilot for our Premium System, designed for use in modern homes. Organic waste is fed directly into the system through the kitchen waste disposal unit and is then turned into renewable energy, which is used as a water heating source for the home and fertilizer for the garden.

What is your vision moving forward?

HomeBiogas aims to revolutionize the way we manage and capture organic waste. Instead of treating waste as a hazard that we need to send away, waste will and should become a resource that we would want to keep and use for our benefit. We are collaborating with strategic partners in the EU and the U.S., who currently operate in the waste management market. At the same time, we are improving our value proposition by enabling HomeBiogas solutions to integrate into households, restaurants and hotels, and multi-family complexes to address the challenges they face concerning organic waste treatment. With the demand for sustainable agriculture on the rise, we also aim to become a significant player in the organic fertilizer market, helping farmers cook with clean energy instead of charcoal or wood, while simultaneously using the fertilizer to continue to grow healthy crops.

Partsimony helps hardware companies turn designs into products with less time, capital and frustration than ever before.

What are your milestones from 2021?

This year, Partsimony made progress building out the zero-trust infrastructure of our new platform. We began to unlock the network effects of the system, with hardware companies onboarding their own manufacturers to the Partsimony network, creating a robust database for shared use. As a result, many hardware companies scaled to production with a monthly average order value increase of 1,444% as of 2021 year-end, compared to January 2021.

What is your vision moving forward?

Our vision is to become the partner of choice by scaling our platform to revolutionize the way physical products are made and scaled for a more sustainable future. Using our SaaS network, we will continue to unify disparate data from multiple sources, enabling manufacturers to more efficiently manage hardware from prototype through production, bringing superior intelligence to manufacturing supply chains.

More than 60%

Lead time reduction

Thrilling, a digital marketplace that brings the best secondhand and vintage clothing stores in the United States online, has made significant strides in opening access to reusable apparel.

What are your milestones from 2021?

In 2021, the growing market for vintage clothing continued to drive our success, with a recently closed $8.5 million Series A raise. With 700 shops on our platform today, and an average 17% month over month top line revenue increase in 2021, Thrilling is well positioned for continued growth. By the end of 2021, we launched our platform for the first time on the app store, with a completely redesigned user experience.

What is your vision moving forward?

Our vision is to become the partner of choice for all the vintage and high-quality secondhand shops around the world, with every high-quality secondhand and vintage item digitized and discoverable on our site. We at Thrilling hope to make vintage shopping a habit for most people, so they turn to secondhand options first, and help drive forward a circular fashion economy.

Thrive Lot, a platform for installing and maintaining edible, ecological landscaping and more, brings regenerative agriculture and yard-to-table health to backyards across the United States.

What are your milestones from 2021?

Founded in 2019, Thrive Lot has already made significant growth since our inception. In 2021, we completed our first 20 projects, leading to 6.2 acres regenerated, 4,800 perennial plants installed and 2.6 million gallons of water retained, according to our Impact Methodology.

What is your vision moving forward?

As we continue to grow, we have another 100 projects in process that should create five times the impact we already achieved. Once the new projects are in place, this would already mean ~25,000 new perennial plants and trees getting life in new spaces. Our goal is to make the process of creating these installations easier and more efficient for all parties involved. Within the next five years, we aim to install over 20,000 projects. With 40 million acres of United States lawns alone that need regenerating, our opportunity for growth is robust, laying the groundwork for healthier soils and food for communities across the United States.

LRS, formerly known as Lakeshore Recycling Systems, is the largest privately-held recycling services company in the Midwest, United States. Operating in and around the Chicago area, where LRS’s services enabled nearly all single-family homes to have access to recycling, LRS plays a critical role in providing the infrastructure needed to recover recyclable materials and keep them within manufacturing supply chains.

How has Closed Loop Partners supported your growth to date?

In 2016, the Closed Loop Infrastructure Fund (CLIF) helped finance the development of a new, modern single-stream material recovery facility (MRF) inside LRS’s existing transfer station in Forest View, IL. This was then complemented with a follow-on loan from CLIF in 2018, which helped add a sortation line for residential recyclables to LRS’s construction & demolition-focused MRF in Northbrook, IL. Both developments were crucial to executing on additionality of materials impacted, given that the alternative providers in the area were already operating at capacity––meaning excess material was often pushed through, potentially leading to contaminated bales, low-quality commodities, and materials missed on conveyor lines ended up in landfills. LRS’s projects in Forest View and Northbrook collectively process close to 100K tons of recyclables a year, keeping valuable commodities in circulation and out of landfills.

What is your vision moving forward?

The catalytic capital we received from CLIF has helped spur additional investment into our business. This has proven the case for multiple phases of our company’s capitalization, and most recently in 2021, with an investment from Macquarie Infrastructure Partners. Through this validating growth investment, we have now repaid CLIF’s loan in full and are well-positioned for further expansion of our top-tier, circular material solutions through both organic growth as well as opportunistic acquisitions that will strategically expand our reach and impact.

*In 2021, LRS fully paid off its loan from Closed Loop Partners, thus exiting the Closed Loop Infrastructure Fund’s portfolio as a borrower. The Closed Loop Partners team, however, continues engaging with the LRS team as they continue growing their operations.

Ripple Glass, a glass recycling company, was born out of a Kansas City brewery’s goal to keep glass out of landfills, and in circulation. Since its founding, the company constructed a state-of-the-art processing plant and continues to place large glass recycling roll off containers throughout metro areas to collect glass and turn it into new products.

What are your milestones from 2021?

Through Closed Loop Partners’ loan, we upgraded our optical sortation equipment to increase the efficiency of glass processing and reduce processing waste, supporting our goals of becoming as close to zero waste as possible. We also expanded our Metro program by an additional four glass recycling locations and received grant funding to support 10 additional locations with unique “art bins.” While 2021 brought on challenges including increased costs associated with supply chain disruptions and shipping and hauling, our commercial collection business rebounded, expanding 50% over the start of the year and now collecting over a thousand tons of glass from businesses, restaurants and apartment complexes annually. To date, we have seen a 10% increase in glass collection.

What is your vision moving forward?

Today, we have collection sites across 10 U.S. states, helping hundreds of communities keep glass out of their landfills. Moving forward, we aim to expand glass collection and recycling access, and upgrade our processing capacity. In early 2022, as part of our work to support the local food and culture community, we will expand our bar and restaurant program, supporting sustainable business practices through glass recycling and waste diversion. We look forward to continuing our work with cities, counties and businesses across the Midwest, establishing and expanding critical glass recycling programs.

rPlanet Earth is the world’s first completely vertically integrated manufacturer of recycled PET packaging and other products. The company sorts, flakes and molds recycled PET into innovative food-grade packaging formats, such as new containers and sheet.

What are your milestones from 2021?

Over the last year, we recycled over 60 million pounds of post-consumer baled PET for use in our finished products, including drinking cups, square deli containers and salad containers, clean washed PET flake and bottle preforms. We are proud to share that due to process efficiencies, the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the manufacturing of our products is among the lowest in the world. Closed Loop Partners’ loan helped finance the purchase of quality control and quality assurance equipment, critical especially for manufacturing food-grade packaging and products.

What is your vision moving forward?

With market demand high, we are well positioned for growth, and will continue to expand our team. Our next steps are to double production capacity in our existing plant in Vernon, CA. Furthermore, we plan to build three or more plants in high population density regions across the U.S., to provide our customers with a coast-to-coast network of consistent, high-quality rPET products.

The Waste Commission of Scott County, a solid waste district in Eastern Iowa, continues to advance recycling rates for the city.

What are your milestones from 2021?

In 2021, we made significant adjustments to our operations and business to meet the challenges of the pandemic, implementing new policies to strengthen our employee base and adapt to market fluctuations. During this market turnaround, the cart loan from Closed Loop Partners played a critical role in helping the County maintain steady product pricing. This helped keep operations running, until this was later bolstered by the recycling market’s recovery, as the value of a ton of single stream recycled materials increased by almost 85% from January to November 2021. The loan that helped fund the optical sorters also supported by increasing the recovery of PET and 3D fiber, and improving the quality of PET and other commodities.

What is your vision moving forward?

We will continue to strengthen and grow our team, and explore advancements in our operations. The Commission is currently evaluating equipment optimization to determine the need for additional technology, such as optical sorters or robotics, to continue improving the recovery of materials and support the work of our staff.

Evergreen, a portfolio company of the Closed Loop Infrastructure Fund and Closed Loop Beverage Fund, is a leading plastics reclaimer and rPET manufacturing facility.

What are your milestones from 2021?

In 2021, we launched a project to double our food-grade recycled PET (rPET) capacity to 80 million pounds per year, harnessing the latest recycling technology. The $22 million project will include the installation of new equipment and technology, and expansion of the 238,000-square-foot building by 54,000 square feet, providing additional space for pelletizing. Our growth trajectory is now further supported by Closed Loop Partners’ investment, which helped us increase capacity for clear food-grade pellets and meet the growing demand for rPET.

What is your vision moving forward?

Growth continues to be a priority for the company. We have been serving the PET recycling space for over 20 years, producing food-grade resin for the bottle industry, and are seeing increasing demand for our services. We will collaborate closely with partners, including Closed Loop Partners, MRFs and other suppliers, to increase collection and to ensure consistent supply of materials.

Founded in 2002, ERI’s status as the leading pioneer of the e-waste recycling and hardware data destruction industries has led to year-over-year growth. Today, ERI is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States.

What are your milestones from 2021?

In 2021, ERI kept 14.1 million pounds of glass, 1.6 million pounds of batteries, 50.4 million pounds of metals and 26 million pounds of plastics out of landfills and into the circular economy. In June 2021, we joined Closed Loop Partners’ portfolio, and welcomed the firm’s founder & CEO, Ron Gonen, to our board. Also in 2021, we established a strategic partnership with Redwood Materials, a strategic investor in ERI that now receives all our batteries and solar shred materials for responsible recycling. Redwood’s founder, and Tesla co-founder, JB Straubel also joined our board. Materials once considered impossible to recycle are now a part of ERI’s suite of day-to-day service, thanks to yet another radically transparent partnership.

What is your vision moving forward?

Our future plans are to continue to profitably expand our geographic footprint, with more locations in 2022 and 2023. We will also continue to grow and apply our innovative proprietary Optech tracking system and robotics at all our facilities. We will focus on helping customer brands achieve their ESG and circular economy goals, including assisting them in meeting net zero emissions, net zero waste and zero landfill objectives.

Founded in 1994, Balcones is the largest independent recycling facility in the Southwest U.S. Focused on technology, innovation and material quality, they derive their profits exclusively from recycling.

What are your milestones from 2021?

In 2021, we entered into a long-term agreement with Central Texas Refuse, LLC (CTR), a subsidiary of Integrated Waste Solutions Group, LLC (IWSG), to operate their recycling facility, located in Taylor, Texas. CTR will continue to collect, haul and deliver residential, commercial municipal and other recyclables in the Central Texas area to the Balcones facilities. With this partnership, Balcones can continue to expand our recycling presence in the Austin region, and strengthen the supply chains available for recyclable materials.

What is your vision moving forward?

We are focused on continuing to grow our business and finding innovative opportunities to increase the value we deliver to our communities. We have added key team members this year, setting the stage to have a strong, energetic and intentional group of leaders, positioning us to follow through on exciting opportunities in Texas, and a few other possibilities in the southwest and southeast regions of the country.