Most people wouldn’t think of Mexico as one of the world’s leading plastic recycling countries, but it is. It has taken a concerted effort by both governmental agencies and private sector businesses over the last few decades to achieve some startling successes. Mexico now recycles approximately 50% of plastics produced there, compared to around 10% in the United States. The goal is to reach 80% by 2030, just five years from now.
The country took a major step toward reaching that goal with the enactment of the General Law on Circular Economy, or LGEC, in January. The goal of the LGEC is to create a nationwide framework to reduce resource extraction, extend product lifecycles, and minimize waste generation. The centerpiece of the legislation lies in Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR, provisions. Producers and importers are required to create circular product designs, focusing on durability, repairability, and recyclability. The program allows for various incentives like tax reduction for good product design and preferential treatment in the government’s procurement process.
ECOCE’s Crucial Role
The focus on EPR isn’t unique to Mexico, but the country’s recent history lends itself to the idea. Much of the progress in recycling has been made possible through the efforts of ECOCE. ECOCE is a non-profit environmental civil association created and sponsored by the food and beverage industry in Mexico. It administers Mexico’s national private collective packaging management plan for post-consumer plastic, aluminum, and other materials on behalf of its member companies. These companies include Mexican and multinational brands like PepsiCo, Danone, Mondelez, Unilever, Nestle, Quaker, etc.
Formed in 2002, ECOCE’s first major area of focus was to create a circular economy for PET plastic widely used in beverage bottles. It has been a wild success to this point, with PET collection rates having grown to about 63%, which is about the same collection rate as Europe (in the U.S. that rate sits around 33%). The world’s largest food-grade PET recycling facility can be found in Mexico.
A high level of technological development, collaboration, public education, and commitment combined to allow the country to reach these levels of recycling, but ECOCE is not done by any means. The organization is now turning its attention to another major source of plastic waste – flexible and multi-layer plastics. Think plastic bags, chip bags, bread bags, candy wrappers – if you start examining packaging you’ll notice how widespread and variable flexible plastics are. In Mexico it is estimated that about 1.5 million tonnes of flexible plastics are produced each year, or about 1.5 times as much volume as PET bottles.
The problem is that current technologies are unable to recycle the vast majority of it. It takes too much separation, washing, and sorting to create the single polymer feedstock necessary to feed mechanical- or pyrolysis-based recycling systems. It just doesn’t work.
ECOCE Collaborates with Aduro Clean Technologies
Aduro Clean Technologies (Nasdaq: ADUR) (TSX: ACT) (FSE: 9D5) is on the verge of commercializing a potential solution within the next year or so. Its Hydrochemolytic™ technology (HCT) is a water-based chemical system capable of recycling a wide variety of plastics into the materials used to create new plastics. HCT requires minimal sorting and cleaning, operates at significantly lower temperatures than current approaches, uses much less energy, and is scalable from small localized solutions up to metropolitan mega-facilities.
In December, 2025, Aduro and ECOCE entered into a multiyear collaboration to evaluate and refine HCT for the recycling of post-consumer mixed and flexible plastics. Now, Aduro has announced that Phase 1 has been completed. During this period, the parties “identified multiple post-consumer flexible packaging streams and assessed them for estimated availability, collection routes, physical form, contamination profile, and preparation requirements. The work identified candidate streams with sufficient available volume to support an industrially relevant evaluation and with material characteristics that warrant advancement to HCT testing.”
ECOCE’s established infrastructure throughout Mexico is important. A major issue with plastic recycling in general is the supply chain. How is plastic collected and sorted and transported to the actual recycling facility capable of handling each type of plastic? These considerations were central to Phase 1. The logistics have been mapped, which is a step ahead of where emerging technologies often find themselves. Now Aduro gets to test how HCT handles the selected waste streams, knowing there is a realistic path to actually recycling them in the real world with the help of ECOCE’s existing systems.
ECOCE’s track record of setting and achieving ambitious goals for recycling programs is documented. There is certainly the organizational will to make this collaboration work, and Aduro’s patented technology appears to be a perfect fit for the task. While other recyclers battle over the cleanest and purest plastic waste feedstocks available, Aduro positions itself as the solution for the dirty and impure waste streams that others can’t handle.
Revenue Opportunity
The financial implications of the collaboration are fairly staggering for Aduro as it nears commercialization. Currently generating no significant revenue, with a market capitalization around $530 million, Aduro is addressing a massive global market in need of technological solutions that can enable a circular economy for plastic waste. But just this one agreement, in one country of about 130 million people, has the potential to create transformative revenues for the company.
Capturing even 5% of the flexible plastic market in Mexico could generate $60 to $100 million in annual revenue. But ECOCE is not looking for a 5% solution, they want circularity across the country and have been successful in setting up a national system to achieve that goal with other plastic types. And there are no other technologies capable of recycling flexible plastics currently on the market.
The Takeaway
ECOCE basically controls the waste recycling streams for the country. Collection and sorting and cleaning systems are all in place. The federal government has mandated circularity. Aduro has the opportunity to drop its scalable HCT technology right in the middle of this highly functional system to process large volumes of plastic that cannot be currently recycled.
It’s a dream scenario for the company, and the commercial relationships formed with ECOCE members through the collaboration could help Aduro spread its revolutionary technology around the globe. This is definitely a story investors should be following.
Author’s Disclosure: This article reflects the author’s independent analysis and is provided for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial or investment advice. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own independent research and due diligence before making any investment decisions.
