The Fourth State of Matter
When you hear “plasma”, you might first think of blood or TV screens. But the plasma that matters for Cyclize is something else: it’s often called the fourth state of matter—alongside solid, liquid and gas.
What is Plasma and Where Do We Find it?
If you keep heating a gas, at some point the atoms and molecules get so much energy that they split into charged particles: electrons and ions.
This “soup” od charged particles is called plasma.
That sounds exotic, but it’s actually very common in nature:
- The Sun and stars are giant balls of plasma.
- Aurora borealis is: plasma.
- Lightning is a short lived plasma channel in the air.
- The glowing inside of neon tubes is plasma, too.
Because plasma contains free charges, it responds to electric and magnetic fields and opens reaction pathways that are difficult or impossible in “normal” gases. That’s exactly what makes it interesting for industry—and for Cyclize.
How Is Plasma Used in Industry Today?
Plasma is already a mature industrial tool, even if most people never notice it.
Some typical applications:
Surface treatment
Plasma is used to clean, activate or coat surfaces—for example before painting plastics, bonding components or applying functional coatings. It can change how surfaces “behave” without using solvents.
Semiconductor and display manufacturing
In chip and display production, plasma processes are standard: they etch ultra-fine structures into materials or deposit thin films with nanometre precision. Without plasma, modern electronics would not exist in their current form.
Lighting
Fluorescent tubes and many special lamps work with low-pressure plasmas that emit light when an electric field accelerates electrons in a gas.
Environmental and special processes
There are also applications in gas cleaning, sterilisation and materials processing, where plasma helps break down pollutants, kill germs or modify material properties.
In all these cases, plasma is used because it enables very energetic reactions at conditions where a conventional thermal process would be too slow, too inefficient, technically impractical or plainly non-existent.
How Does Cyclize Use plasma?
Cyclize uses plasma for something different: turning carbon-rich complex mixed waste and CO₂ into syngas: a gas mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that is widely used as a building block in the chemical industry.
Very simplified, the idea is this:
- Inputs: Carbon-rich waste streams (solid, liquid or gaseous) and CO₂.
- Process: In a specially designed plasma reactor, these streams are exposed to an electric discharge. The plasma provides enough energy to break chemical bonds and rearrange the atoms.
- Output: A defined mixture of H₂ and CO, i.e. syngas, that is free of virgin fossil carbon, which can be used as feedstock for existing chemical processes instead of syngas from fossil natural gas or fossil coal.
Plasma is crucial here because it lets Cyclize:
- Work with mixed and complex waste streams that are hard to recycle otherwise.
- Use electricity as the main energy input—which can become increasingly green as the power system decarbonizes.
- Operate under conditions that make the formation of syngas from waste and CO₂ technically feasible and scalable.
For Cyclize, plasma is therefore not just a “cool technology”, but the enabler for a new carbon loop:
Instead of extracting fossil carbon, using it once and emitting it as CO₂, carbon can be recovered from waste and CO₂, converted in the plasma process, and reused as a feedstock.
In other words:
Plasma is the tool that allows Cyclize to electrify and defossilize one of the most basic building blocks of the chemical industry—syngas—while making use of carbon that is already in the system.
