Manufacturing Biomass-Based Plastics

With new technology originally developed at EPFL  , plant materials can be used as an alternative to petroleum derivatives for producing a wide range of products, including bioplastics, textiles, and cosmetics. EPFL spin-off Bloom Biorenewables is producing the biomass technology. Currently only cellulose, which accounts for about 40% of biomass’ total weight, can be recovered and the rest is either burned or discarded. Bloom Biorenewables' technology allows biomass' other components, namely lignin and hemicellulose, to be recovered intact. Potential applications are wide-ranging, and would let manufacturers use nearly 75% of this environment-friendly resource.

Transcript

00:00:00 we have a huge problem in front of us and that's atmospheric co2 concentration we are using everyday fossil fuels and products that we extract from the ground and we just release them in the atmosphere and the everyday consumer is not aware how long it will take to remove them again and to get back to the concentration we

00:00:21 had in the 90s which is essential to keep our environment as it is it happens that plants do retrieve carbon from the atmosphere by their normal photosynthesis and what bloom does really is take this carbon that is stored in the plants and makes with a higher efficiency

00:00:41 products out of it that we can use in our daily lives to replace fossil based alternatives so the challenge is that biomass is a complex mixture of three main components and efficient valorization means that you can separate and isolate each of those fractions it's very similar to starting with an egg which is composed of the shell

00:01:01 the yolk and the white and instead of just crushing the egg in your hand and getting a mixture this is what the industry is doing today we can carefully crack the egg and isolate the yolk from the white and from the shell and then develop a specific recipe from each of the fractions so this is exactly what we do with biomass we start

00:01:20 from wood chips we suspend it in a solvent together with an acid and we add our almost magic ingredient the stabilizing agent which is preventing the degradation of the molecules and then once we isolate those fractions we can develop a wide range of products to replace petrol-based products for instance

00:01:38 fragrances paintings textiles or cosmetics but we can also develop new products and this is here one example bioplastics we develop together with epfl so we can develop rigid materials we can make soft materials and typical applications will be for packaging applications

00:01:56 now the whole efforts are going to be in scaling this technology to meet the market demands so we're going to set up our own lab in in renault and we gonna use this lab to produce sufficient quantities to validate the markets which is one of the main tasks that we have ahead

00:02:16 because we have to show to the market that we can meet the properties that are required from these materials but also the price and and the pricing will be a modeling aspect to see how this evolves in a large scale plant that will be the matter of our next series a

00:02:39 financing round you