LOIM's plastic fund backs circularity's hard half

Lombard Odier Investment Managers has put its Plastic Circularity Fund behind two more companies, a pair that points to where the strategy now sees value: Fych Technologies, in Alicante, is patenting recycling of complex multilayer plastics where contamination is framed as the key bottleneck, and Bloom Biorenewables, a Swiss firm, converts non-edible biomass into bio-based chemicals and materials that decouple chemical production from fossil fuels. Check sizes don't appear in the coverage.

The vehicle deserves more attention than the two names inside it—a Luxembourg-domiciled private equity growth and expansion strategy managed from Geneva, launched in 2022 with an IRR target in the mid-teens, its seed investor the Alliance to End Plastic Waste with a $10 million commitment.

Market-rate return targets sitting on top of anchor capital from a consortium built around a single environmental problem is not how transition finance usually gets assembled; in concessionary and blended structures, philanthropic or state money takes the first loss so commercial investors can come in behind it at a lower hurdle. A $10 million anchor check inside a fund promising mid-teens suggests the anchor is buying deal access and industrial insight, not serving as a first-loss cushion. On that reading, LOIM's edge is origination—knowing which waste streams and which chemistry teams are worth a look—and the fund's risk sits in its portfolio companies, not in a subsidy mechanism.

As this publication has argued, transition finance is moving from labeled capital to named assets, and the test that follows is underwriting delivery milestones rather than announcements. Two named companies, one aimed squarely at the contamination that keeps mixed plastic out of the recycling stream, is a step in the right direction; the unresolved part is scale. Growth-stage process companies in materials and chemicals carry the risk that a working bench process and a working plant are different assets, and a mid-teens target leaves limited headroom for a portfolio company that needs a second capital round before it has industrial volumes.

Four years into the vintage, the coverage still carries exactly one fund-level number: the $10 million seed commitment.