Two pitches stand between a Tulum plastic plant and a million dollars

Waste Neutral Technologies, a company that converts plastic waste into fuel at a plant in Tulum, won the Startup World Cup Quintana Roo semifinal held in Playa del Carmen on August 27.

The win hands the company the state's place in the national final in Chihuahua. Whoever takes that round represents Mexico at the competition's grand finale in San Francisco, where the prize is a one million dollar investment from Pegasus Tech Ventures, the Silicon Valley fund that runs the Startup World Cup.

Tulum has gone without its own landfill since 2023. That is why a plant sitting inside the municipality, eating the plastic that recycling will not take, is a local story before it is a startup story.

Plastic in, gasoline and engine additives out

Carlos Segura, project manager at Mayma México, the civil association that organized the semifinal, described the technology in one line. The company transforms plastics into fuels and engine additives, he said; gasoline made out of plastic.

Mayma says the company works with both recyclable and non-recyclable plastic, turning it into fuel and additives, and that it already operates a plant in Tulum.

Past that, the public record thins out fast. No processing capacity was mentioned in the announcement or in the coverage that followed. Neither did the plant's address, its permit status, or where it buys the plastic it runs through the process. Nothing published this week connects the operation to the municipal waste stream.

What a million dollars would build

Segura laid out the company's plan for the prize money. Three more plants in Mexico, on top of the one in Tulum, and a move into Asia, where he said negotiations are already under way.

The prize is an investment rather than a grant, which means the winner takes capital and a shareholder at the same time. It also assumes two more wins that have not happened yet.

Sargassum filled most of the other nine pitches

Ten teams competed at the Hyatt Centric in Playa del Carmen, selected from more than 15 applications. Each had three minutes to pitch in English, the format used at the world final, before a jury drawn from several sectors and roughly 70 guests. The evening ran from six to nine.

The plastics company was the outlier in the room. According to El Economista's account of the night, the rest of the field leaned on the macroalga that has defined the coast for a decade: sargassum leather and sandals, a process for capturing the algae before it reaches the sand, anti-aging cosmetics.

One detail decided who could win. Segura said the call was open nationwide, but the regional representative had to be Mexican, which is how the Quintana Roo ticket stayed with the Tulum project.

The eight teams that did not take it are already selling, he said, and remain inside Mayma's network, with workshops and introductions to impact investors.

How the Startup World Cup reached Quintana Roo

Mayma México arrived in 2024 with backing from the Visa Foundation to examine one thing: the business ecosystem forming around sargassum. Olmo Torres, the organization's director in Mexico, has said the review found that the side of the coast was badly under-supported, and that the finding led to a two-year work plan for the state.

By July of this year, the group told a press conference in Playa del Carmen that it had 83 companies in its strengthening and linkage programs, according to Noticaribe. The semifinal itself emerged from an alliance among Mayma, the Emprende Chihuahua movement, and Pegasus Tech Ventures, with the Riviera Maya Hotel Association and the Mexican Association of Businesswomen in the Riviera Maya signing on as local allies.

Torres has described the work as joining conversations that had remained apart for years, among them entrepreneurship, investment, tourism, and conservation. Accelerating startups is the easy half, he said. The harder half is building conditions in which a growing company leaves value behind in the territory.

That is the pitch a development organization makes. Whether it holds depends on companies like this one clearing the next two rounds.

Tulum's landfill closed in 2023

The local backdrop is less polished than the competition.

Quintana Roo Hoy reported in August 2024 that Tulum's landfill shut down in November 2023 and that the municipality had spent 82 million pesos moving waste out of its own territory, beginning with a six-million-peso direct-award contract for urgent transfers. The same report said the Secretariat of National Defense had stepped in to build a small landfill at a cost of 15 million pesos.

The volume figures are older and should be read that way. Sipse put Tulum's daily collection at 200 tons in 2019, when the previous cell reached the end of its life. In a December 2020 interview with La Jornada Maya, the operator of a new recycling center used the same 200-ton figure and broke it down as roughly half organic, 35 percent recyclable, and 15 percent non-recyclable material headed for the dump.

That last slice is the category the company says it works with. No source published this week says the Tulum plant touches any of it.

September 24 in Chihuahua, November 6 in San Francisco

The national final is scheduled for September 24 in Chihuahua, as part of Chihuahua Tech Week, according to the organizers of the Mexican regional round. El Economista, reporting on September 1, put the Chihuahua stage on September 27 and 28. The discrepancy has not been resolved publicly.

The date after that one is firmer. Pegasus Tech Ventures announced on August 24 that the grand finale runs November 4 to 6 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square, with about 200 regional champions from six continents and more than 5,000 attendees. The pitch final is November 6.

Mexico's seat is not new, and last year it went north. BIO GRIP, a Chihuahua company led by Alan Hernández Ventura that builds low-cost biosensors for controlling prosthetics, won the 2025 national final and carried the country to San Francisco.

Three weeks separate Waste Neutral Technologies from its turn. Segura said the company wants four plants in Mexico. Today it has one.

Our coverage of the region's waste economy includes the circular economy park proposed for Quintana Roo, the businesses already turning seaweed into products, and our live sargassum report for the coast.

Can a plant that turns plastic into fuel make a real dent in Tulum's waste problem, or does the fix start with collection? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.