With the recovery and reuse of materials more important than ever, it appears that circularity’s time has come.
Mesh Bioplastics has had a great year. The Limerick based business was founded in 2024 to address the growing need for manufacturing materials that meet strict performance requirements while supporting sustainability and circularity.
It does this by combining advanced materials science with intelligent manufacturing processes, helping customers to develop products that scale responsibly, without compromising on quality.
It is focused on building sustainable materials and intelligent manufacturing solutions designed to meet demanding healthcare and industrial applications.
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“We’ve gone from being a one-man band to a team of 11,” says Shane Hannan, its founder, of the past 12 months.
“We’re also developing VariControl which is AI for plastics manufacturing that allows companies to adopt more recycled and biobased content into end products, using the manufacturers’ existing equipment.”
That will help its customers meet new EU packaging and waste regulations, applied since August, aimed at both reducing packaging waste and making the waste value chain more sustainable, strengthening the market for secondary raw materials and supporting the EU’s transition to a circular economy.
Having validated the technology, built up a partner network and secured letters of intent, Hannan’s plan is now to raise funds to get his AI SaaS [software as a service] into full production.
In doing so he will be following in the footsteps of a growing number of home-grown circular success stories, from HaPPE Earth, developer of a compostable alternative to plastic splash aprons used in hospitals, to BiaSol, which upcycles spent grains from the brewing industry into tasty, nutritious snacks.
As circularity has the potential to span all sectors, innovations in the field offer enormous scope for growth. Currently just 2.7 per cent of the materials flowing through Ireland’s economy are being repurposed, compared with a global average of 6.9 per cent, meaning more than 97 per cent of materials used here come from virgin sources, a shocking waste of resources.
The Government aims to help raise that figure to 12 per cent within four years, supported by policies such as green public procurement.
It’s also relying on organisations such as CirculÉire, a cross-sectoral, industry-led innovation organisation that supports enterprises on their journey from linear to circular business models.
Some of its members are making great strides in previously hard-to-circularise sectors such as construction where, for example, Arcology System is using its data-led construction system to deliver modular, reusable components for circular commercial fit-outs, reducing waste.
In catering, Shareclub is providing reusable cups and bowls to offices, canteens, events and cafes, to reduce the use of disposable items. Rebox is pioneering a reuse-first approach to cardboard boxes, while Rezero sources high-quality cellulose acetate from millions of seized illegal cigarettes and turns them into premium buttons and accessories for the fashion industry.
Encouraging investment
While circular innovations are emerging at pace, the challenges are considerable.
EcoRoots, a Cork based biomaterials and industrial biotechnology start-up has developed high performance, compostable packaging from mycelium, the root network of fungi.
Ingeniously, it uses mycelium as a manufacturing organism, transforming agricultural and industrial waste streams into high-performance materials.
Not only is EcoRoots’ material stronger than polystyrene, for example, with the same insulative properties and equally lightweight, but it is also price competitive, the perfect recipe for commercial success.
Yet finding investors has proven challenging, says founder Lavanya Bhandari.
While she is still operating the business’s research and development arm in the UK, where she is focused on digital twinning technology and working with universities and other partners, she has mothballed her Irish manufacturing facility – at least for now.
“We’ve moved out of packaging and are looking at the functional properties of the material in other industries,” she says. “It’s not that we’re gone, we’re just like a mushroom, hibernating slightly until we come out when the weather’s right.”
Bhandari was a participant in Irish Manufacturing Research’s CirculÉire 2025 Circular Venture Accelerator.
Ruairi McLoughlin, founder of Anaula, was on the same programme. His business has also experienced a significant amount of change in the past year, having originally focused on converting whiskey distillery wastewater into algae-based products for fertiliser and fish feed. But ultimately the figures didn’t add up, he says.
He has since pivoted to building autonomous bioreactors for pharmaceutical and biological production. His aim now is to disrupt current bioprocessing infrastructure by offering a more efficient system for scaling molecule production, an opportunity offering much greater revenue potential.
“We’re basically building a drop-in deployment system that scales up production much quicker than legacy systems, and the first industry we’re going after is the protein industry which is absolutely exploding right now,” he says.
McLoughlin is currently raising investment of $1.5 million-$2 million, of which $1.2 million is already closed.
Interestingly though, despite the fact that the new business model still uses photosynthetic cells, massively reducing the use of light, feedstocks and costs for clients, when McLoughlin pitches to investors, he no longer leads with sustainability. Indeed, it isn’t even a secondary feature, “it’s a tertiary benefit,” he says.
Gaining momentum
That circular business models will take time to succeed is only to be expected, says Geraldine Brennan, director of circular economy innovation at Irish Manufacturing Research/CirculÉire. After all, she points out, the linear model – the traditional ‘take, make and dump’ approach – is the very well-established incumbent.
“The ongoing challenge for the circular economy, is the fact that the linear economy has been streamlined over a hundred years,” she says.
While some circular economy businesses are making money and attracting investor interest, others have a bigger fight on their hands to take on the status quo. In some cases, the market is just not ready for them.
“Whenever you have new ways of doing things, there’s always resistance from the incumbents who are doing it the old way,” she says. “Yet the argument for circularity has never been greater.”
From heatwaves, drought and climate change to tariffs, supply chains disruptions, conflict, onshoring trends and fractious geopolitics, circularity makes more sense than ever.
It is also a fact that markets are built and that it is up to governments to build them, in some cases. “It took government intervention and public sector contracts to build a viable, competitive market for solar and other types of renewable energy,” she says.
In building such a market Ireland can also take advantage of the fact that the State agency charged with supporting Irish businesses in internationally traded sectors, Enterprise Ireland, is also one of Europe’s most active investors.
Its involvement as a cofunder could give comfort to the investor community here, to the benefit of circular start-ups which are never going to be unicorns, she points out.
The right policies, funding instruments and incentives can all help build out Ireland’s circular market, for which momentum is building.
Circularity is a hot topic for the EU, at a time when Ireland is hosting its presidency.
The geopolitical shift of the past year and a half has seen countries shut off access to critical raw materials, or threaten to, underscoring the need for all countries to make the most of the resources they have.
“The promise of the circular economy is that if you are not resource rich, but you have markets where products end their first life, that is valuable to you because you can effectively extract the components and the materials within them,” says Brennan.
“As a significant market, the EU is saying, hang on a second. We might not have all the different type of resources that make these goods, but we are a significant market, and those products end their first life here. Why would we ship them away? What current geopolitics has highlighted is that you need to create resiliency, and that it is a valid consideration as part of competitive advantage,” she says.
