Executive Founders
Co-founder - M.B.Admin
Guillaume Perben
Having grown up by the Mediterranean Sea, Guillaume has always been an avid sailor, enjoying both competitive sailing and holiday trips with his children and wife on the family sailboat. After studying business administration in Europe, the US and Japan, he joined the Ford Motor Company where he held positions in Sales, Finance, Marketing and Business Development in Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific, managing teams globally. He then founded his own consulting firms, first in New Caledonia and then in Switzerland, with a focus on business development and restructuring businesses across a variety of industries, including cleantech and waste management. His passion for sailing, his extensive network in the nautical industry, and his awareness of the lack of viable fiberglass recycling solutions for end-of-life sailboats led him to co-found Composite Recycling in 2021.
Co-founder - PhD Physics
Dr. Pascal Gallo
Pascal received his PhD in physics in 2006, specializing in quantum physics and crystal growth. He then joined EPFL in Switzerland as a research scientist, focusing on metalorganic chemical vapor deposition. Using the fundamental principles of thermolysis, he worked successively as operations planner from 2012 at BeamExpress, a telecommunication company developing low power consumption lasers, as chief business development officer from 2014 at Novagan, a company developing high-efficiency lighting solutions, and then in 2015 he co-founded LakeDiamond, manufacturing lab-grown diamonds. In 2021 he teamed up to co-found Composite Recycling, serving as chief scientific officer developing next-generation solutions for the recycling of composites. During his career Pascal, who has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications and patents, has always been inspired to pursue meaningful, cutting-edge technologies with the goal of reducing our environmental footprint.
The Company Origin Story
The story of Composite Recycling started in 2020. Pascal and Gullaume lived in the same village in Switzerland and had already known each other for years, through their sons who attended the same local primary school. They found themselves chatting one day at a neighborhood birthday party.
Guillaume was speaking about boats, a subject he has always been passionate about. Through his contacts in the sailing industry, he had become increasingly aware of the lack of recycling solutions for end-of-life boats made of glass fibre, and the mounting crisis they posed in terms of fibreglass waste. He wondered how he would responsibly dispose of his family’s own beloved boat when it was time to retire it, as there simply weren’t any options that he could feel good about.
Fortunately for Guillaume, he learned that his friend Pascal, a scientist, had expertise in composites. Pascal knew that in fact a technical solution did exist for recycling fiberglass – called thermolysis – but that no one had yet succeeded in finding a profitable way to deploy a fibreglass recycling solution at industrial scale.
It was an “ah-ha” moment – the two friends had uncovered a major unmet need in the composites world, for which a scientific solution existed. From there, it was a matter of capitalizing on their scientific expertise and business development capabilities to develop a viable market solution to make composites recyclable. They decided to work together, and Composite Recycling was born.