When Haggai Alon, founder and CEO of SMX, an Irish firm with its HQ primarily based in Singapore , describes the plastics business, he doesn’t mince phrases: “In the present day’s system burns cash, buries worth, and generates threat.” His firm is wagering {that a} new form of token — the Plastic Cycle Token, or PCT — can flip that script and switch waste right into a monetary asset.
The concept is straightforward. Plastics are marked on the molecular stage, each handoff is logged on blockchain, and every verified kilogram of recycled plastic is wrapped in a digital token. That token isn’t speculative crypto. As Alon explains,
“Each verified kilogram of PCR is wrapped in a Plastic Cycle Token (PCT), a secured digital asset representing auditable, bodily circularity.”
The tokens function each proof and incentive. For manufacturers, they provide compliance-grade knowledge to satisfy tightening international laws. For recyclers, they signify liquidity and financing instruments. For governments, they supply an auditable path that strikes circularity from aspiration to enforcement.
The plastics business has lengthy relied on what’s generally known as mass-balance accounting — a paper system that always masks the true origin and share of recycled content material. Regulators and traders are more and more skeptical. As Alon bluntly places it:
“The recycled plastics market now not runs on belief. It runs on proof.”
SMX’s system embeds an invisible, proprietary marker immediately into resin. Every time the fabric modifications fingers — whether or not it turns into a bottle, an electronics housing, or a part of a automotive inside — these markers may be scanned and recorded. The result’s a digital product passport that tracks grade, origin, and recycled share, all immutable and verifiable in actual time.
Tom Enger, SMX’s chief sustainability officer, argues that this makes the PCT a “next-generation environmental credit score” that may be built-in into ESG reporting and “prepares firms for tightening laws in key international markets.”
The timing is not any accident. Governments throughout Asia-Pacific (APAC) are layering recycled-content mandates with prolonged producer accountability charges and landfill penalties. In India, each PET beverage bottle should include no less than 30% recycled content material starting April 2025. Singapore’s personal deposit-return program launches the identical yr, making a assured stream of unpolluted PET for native recyclers. These measures are shifting economics. Licensed post-consumer resin (PCR) now trades at a premium — 5–15% larger than virgin polymer in enforced markets. Somewhat than balk at these prices, manufacturers embrace them as insurance coverage towards reputational and compliance dangers.
For Alon, that shift is validation.
“Traceability gives insurance coverage towards customs delays, greenwashing accusations, and ESG non-compliance. And in a world the place almost half of world FMCG firms determine packaging sustainability as a prime reputational threat, that insurance coverage issues.”
SMX’s most superior undertaking is in Singapore, via a partnership with the federal government’s know-how arm A*STAR. The joint Plastics Circularity Undertaking embeds molecular markers on the resin stage, tracks each transaction on-chain, and attaches PCTs to verified volumes. Alon calls it “not only a pilot — it’s a blueprint.”
The ambition is regional. The corporate is already in talks with cities and governments in Tokyo, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and the UK. With APAC recycling charges hovering round 6%, the upside is big. Diverting simply one-third of Singapore’s incinerated plastic might save S$27 million in disposal charges and generate S$75 million in financial worth.
Plastic credit should not new. What differentiates PCTs, in response to SMX, is their grounding in bodily actuality. Conventional credit reward end-of-life assortment, like eradicating plastic from rivers or seashores. PCTs are designed for your complete worth chain, from virgin manufacturing via a number of recycling loops.
“They’re compliance-native, not simply one other token play from a whitepaper,” the corporate explains in its interviews. “Not like speculative crypto cash with no financial underpinning… PCTs are grounded in science-based, auditable environmental influence.”
That grounding makes them enticing to traders in addition to regulators. PCTs can underpin inexperienced loans, ESG-linked bonds, or catalytic funds. By giving recyclers and converters a tradable asset, SMX goals to shut the financing hole that has lengthy hobbled recycling infrastructure in Southeast Asia and past.
In SMX’s telling, the Plastic Cycle Token is greater than a compliance instrument. It’s a basis for what Alon calls “the infrastructure for a brand new financial system” — one the place plastics move not into landfills or furnaces however into verifiable, auditable loops of reuse, and the place monetary markets reward those that can show it.
The stakes are excessive, each environmentally and commercially. As Enger places it,
“This isn’t nearly each organisation worldwide taking accountability for plastic waste influence… It’s about constructing the required infrastructure for accountable, strong, and data-driven circularity that coverage makers, traders, and society urgently want.”
For SMX, that infrastructure comes within the type of a token. Whether or not the world is able to settle for plastic as a monetary instrument could effectively decide how a lot of it will get recycled within the years forward.
