MacroCycle Technologies, based in Cambridge, MA, was founded in 2023 by Stwart Peña Feliz, a former ExxonMobil process engineer and MIT Sloan Business School MBA alumnus, and Dr. Jan-Georg Rosenboom, former polymer scientist at MIT’s Langer Lab.
The founders’ path began with a shared frustration over the limitations of conventional chemical recycling in the oil and gas sector. While pursuing their ventures at MIT, Stwart and Jan combined their engineering and scientific expertise to rethink polymer recycling entirely.
MacroCycle’s proprietary platform, SolvoGenesis™, bypasses traditional, energy-intensive depolymerization methods that break PET down into monomers. Instead, SolvoGenesis™ selectively dissolves, purifies, and directly upgrades contaminated PET packaging and mixed textile waste back into virgin-grade PET resin. As a result, this innovation operates with 80% less energy and significantly shorter processing times. Moreover, MacroCycle accepts mixed waste streams that other technologies cannot handle. For the beauty industry, this means drop-in, recycled PET resin that aims for packaging circularity.