The announcement came quietly enough—no splashy press event, just a funding round disclosed in early June. But Circular11, a company working out of a warehouse in Dorset since 2021, had landed €2.7 million (roughly £2.4 million) to scale what might charitably be called an unglamorous business: turning the plastics nobody wants into construction materials.
The pitch is straightforward, perhaps deceptively so. Take the low-grade plastic waste that conventional recycling facilities reject—multilayer packaging, contaminated films, mixed streams destined for landfills or incinerators—and transform it into composite lumber. Fencing. Decking. Benches. The outdoor, non-structural applications where treated timber has long been the default.
It's the kind of circular economy play that looks tidy on paper. Whether it pencils out at commercial scale is another question entirely.
Money From Climate-Focused Backers
Vectr7 Investment Partners, a UK climate impact investor, led the equity round. The FSE Group came in as co-lead through the British Business Bank's South West Investment Fund, chipping in £630,000. The FSE Investor Network and Oxford Innovation Network joined, along with a handful of private backers. An Innovate UK grant padded the total, though the company didn't specify how much.
The investor lineup tells you something about Circular11's dual appeal—carbon math that works alongside a product people might actually buy. Vectr7 doesn't typically fund moonshots; they want climate technologies with plausible pathways to profitability. That the South West Investment Fund got involved suggests regional development priorities at play, too.
Still, climate tech has a well-documented graveyard of promising ideas that couldn't survive contact with real-world economics. The pressure's on Circular11 to prove this isn't another one.
The Recycling Problem That Won't Go Away
Less than 10% of the world's plastic waste gets meaningfully recycled, according to OECD figures. The rest? Landfilled, burned, or "mismanaged"—a polite term for dumped in places it shouldn't be.
The gap exists partly because recycling is finicky. Flexible films, mixed materials, contaminated streams—conventional facilities can't handle them economically. So they don't. Circular11's bet is that there's value hiding in that rejected waste, if you can figure out the processing.
Their approach involves shredding incoming plastics, running chemical profiling to understand the material composition, then deploying machine-learning algorithms to determine optimal formulations for composite products. The output gets extruded into plastic lumber designed to replace wood in outdoor settings.
Each product carries a minimum 10-year guarantee, with an expected service life closer to 30 years. The company has built a digital tracking system that logs feedstock sources and embedded carbon—a data layer that matters more than it used to, now that infrastructure clients face net-zero procurement mandates they can't easily ignore.
Ambitious Targets, Operational Reality
The €2.7 million is earmarked for manufacturing scale-up and further technology development. Circular11 has set what feels like an audacious target: recycling 10,000 tonnes of low-grade plastic over the next two years.
To hit that number, the company is relocating to a 34,000-square-foot facility and planning to increase throughput by a factor somewhere between six and nine during 2026, according to a February report from Connected Places Catapult. Headcount—currently 13 employees—is expected to double as production ramps.
That's a lot of moving parts. Hardware-intensive businesses don't scale linearly, and feedstock variability in recycled materials adds complexity most manufacturers never touch.
On the regulatory side, though, Circular11 has some wind at its back. The EU tightened restrictions on creosote-treated wood in 2023, and the UK is reviewing further curbs. Traditional timber durability solutions face pressure. Alternative materials have an opening, if they can deliver on performance and price.
From Nepal to National Highways
Founders Benjamin Paul Gibbons and Connor Graham Winter started Circular11 in 2021, emerging from earlier work on waste management in Nepal. The experience watching open burning and inadequate disposal infrastructure apparently clarified their thinking—there's money, and purpose, in salvaging value from waste streams others write off.
Since then they've secured partnerships that matter in UK construction. National Highways brought them into an Accelerating Low Carbon Innovation trial testing acoustic and boundary fencing in 2024, working alongside Kier, a major contractor. Wates Innovation Partners lists the company among its collaborators. Connected Places Catapult's roads innovation accelerator has been involved.
EU-Startups reported Circular11 raised €578,000 (£500,000) back in 2023 to establish their initial Dorset manufacturing facility, though independent confirmation of that figure remains elusive.
The Hard Part Starts Now
Fresh capital and expanded manufacturing capacity sets up the next test: proving the unit economics actually work beyond pilot scale. Can Circular11 manage feedstock variability while maintaining consistent product quality? Will margins hold serving price-sensitive construction markets? The 10,000-tonne target over 24 months isn't just an operational challenge—it's a referendum on whether the business model survives in the wild.
If it does, the playbook likely travels. Plastic waste, regulatory headwinds on treated timber, demand for sustainable construction materials—those dynamics aren't confined to the UK. But first, Circular11 has to make it work in Dorset.
That's the unsexy reality of circular economy startups. Great pitch decks don't guarantee great businesses. The company has backers, partnerships, and a credible technical approach. What it needs now is execution. Lots of it.
