Intermix
Performance Materials
Our Mission
Today, less than 2% of plastic materials are recycled in a closed loop, leaving enormous value locked in mixed plastic waste streams.
Our mission is to change that.
Recycling processes are often laborious, cost intensive, and create plastic products with inferior properties. Finding ways to make recycling more economically viable will help mitigating our current plastic waste crisis. This is where Intermix recycling additives will play a vital role in enabling a more circular polymer economy.
Polyolefin materials, like polyethylene and polypropylene, make up more than half of our annually produced post-consumer plastic waste. Unfortunately, separation of these plastics often fails, leading to polymer mixtures.These mixtures are immiscible, leading to recycled plastics with extremely poor mechanical performance. This makes it impossible to reintroduce them as recycled products. As a result, they get incinerated, landfilled, or might even leach into the environment.
Due to their difficult separation in mechanical recycling, polyolefin fractions often are obtained as mixed fractions with high levels of contaminations by other plastics. This significantly impacts how well these mixed polyolefin bales can be recycled in a closed loop, making it more viable to discard them. To enable viable recycling, we need additives to make these mixed recycling fractions reusable.
We develop next-generation recycling additives that enable mixed plastics to be recycled together without losing performance. By restoring material properties and reducing the need for virgin plastics, our technology helps unlock circular economy pathways that make plastic recycling more viable, scalable, and economically attractive.
The Problem
When mixed polyolefin waste plastics, like high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and isotactic polypropylene (iPP), are mechanically recycled together, they completely loose their mechanical integrity due to their immiscibility.
These poor material properties prevent effective recycling, leading to the disposal of these mixed plastic waste feed streams rather than being used in a circular economy.
Our Solution
By adding designed copolymers to these polyolefin mixtures, their mechanical properties can successfully be restored. These so-called compatibilizers basically act as polymeric soaps, facilitating better mixing and thus better material properties.
By adding our compatibilizers to mixed waste plastic streams, we can produce alloys of HDPE and iPP in any ratio with restored mechanical stability. This removes the need for laborious and expensive separation, ultimately making recycling more economically viable.
Sources:
1) Eagan, J. M.; Xu, J.; Di Girolamo, R.; Thurber, C. M.; Macosko, C. W.; LaPointe, A. M.; Bates, F. S.; Coates, G. W. Combining polyethylene and polypropylene: Enhanced performance with PE/iPP multiblock polymers. Science 2017, 355, 814−816.
2) Klimovica, K.; Pan, S.; Lin, T.-W.; Peng, X.; Ellison, C. J.; LaPointe, A. M.; Bates, F. S.; Coates, G. W. Compatibilization of iPP/HDPE Blends with PE-g-iPP Graft Copolymers. ACS Macro Lett.
2020, 9, 1161−1166.
3) Kränzlein, M.; Cui, S.; Hu, J.; LaPointe, A. M.; Fors, B. P.; Coates, G. W. One-Step Radical-Induced Synthesis of Graft Copolymers for Effective Compatibilization of Polyethylene and Polypropylene, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2025, 147, 19052–19060.
4) Zhang, M.; Kränzlein, M.; Cui, S.; LaPointe, A. M.; Coates, G. W. C–H Insertion Functionalization of Polyolefins for Versatile Polyolefin-Polyester Compatibilization, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2026, asap articles.
Who we are
Intermix Performance Materials is a Cornell University spin-off start-up currently located in Ithaca, New York. The company was founded in 2020 by Prof. Dr. Geoffrey Coates, Jack Lester, and Dr. Ting-Wei Lin, a former Ph.D. student and Postdoctoral Researcher in Geoff Coates' group at Cornell. We currently hold 3 exclusively licensed patents for our compatibilizer technology with two more pending applications.Currently we are being supported by Jeff Uhrig as Early Equity Advisory and Dr. Moritz Kränzlein, also a former Postdoctoral Researcher at Cornell familiar with our compatibilizer technology.
Prof. Dr. Geoff Coates
CTO & Co-Founder
Dr. Ting-Wei Lin
Scientist
Jack Lester
Advisor & Co-Founder
Dr. Moritz Kränzlein
Scientific Consultant
Jeff Uhrig
Advisor
Are you interested or ready to collaborate?
Connect with us on LinkedIn!
In the News
Happy together: Peroxide binds incompatible polymers for recycling
How does evolving compatibiliser technology enable the recycling of
mixed plastic waste?
Chemists are reimagining recycling to keep plastics out of landfills
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