Issue 02/2016

News
CO 2
-based building block
for PEF
Stanford scientists have discovered a novel way to make PEF
from carbon dioxide (CO 2
) and inedible plant material, such as
agricultural waste and grasses as a low-carbon alternative to PET.
“Our goal is to replace petroleum-derived products with plastic
made from CO 2
,” said Matthew Kanan, an assistant professor of
chemistry at Stanford. “If you could do that without using a lot of
non-renewable energy, you could dramatically lower the carbon
footprint of the plastics industry.”
The scientists focused on the development of polyethylenefuranoate,
or PEF. The properties of PEF, including their
advantages over PET have been described manifold in bioplastics
MAGAZINE. However, the plastics industry is trying hard to find a
low-cost way to manufacture it at scale. The bottleneck has been
figuring out a commercially viable way to produce the precursor
FDCA sustainably.
Instead of using sugar from corn to make FDCA, the Stanford
team has been experimenting with furfural, a compound made
from agricultural waste that has been widely used for decades.
But making FDCA from furfural and CO 2
typically requires
hazardous chemicals that are expensive and energy-intensive to
make. “That really defeats the purpose of what we’re trying to
do,” Kanan said.
The Stanford team’s approach has the potential to significantly
reduce greenhouse emissions, Kanan said, because the CO 2
required to make PEF could be obtained from fossil-fuel power
plant emissions or other industrial sites. KL/MT
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2016/march/low-carbon-bioplastic-030916.html
Hybrid technology to
make biobased nylon
Engineers at Iowa State University have found a way to combine
a genetically engineered strain of yeast and an electrocatalyst to
efficiently convert sugar into a new type of nylon.
Previous attempts to combine biocatalysis and chemical
catalysis to produce biobased chemicals have resulted in low
conversion rates. That’s usually because the biological processes
leave residual impurities that harm the effectiveness of chemical
catalysts.
The engineers’ successful hybrid conversion process is
described online and as the cover paper of the Feb. 12 issue of
the journal “Angewandte Chemie International Edition”.
“The ideal biorefinery pipelines, from biomass to the final
products, are currently disrupted by a gap between biological
conversion and chemical diversification. We herein report a
strategy to bridge this gap with a hybrid fermentation and
electrocatalytic process,” wrote lead authors Zengyi Shao and
Jean-Philippe Tessonnier, Iowa State assistant professors of
chemical and biological engineering who are also affiliated with
the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center
for Biorenewable Chemicals (CBiRC) based at Iowa State. KL/MT
www.news.iastate.edu/news/2016/02/08/biopolymers
IKEA to move away
from fossil plastics
IKEA SUPPLY AG and Newlight Technologies have
announced that they have entered into a supply
collaboration, and technology license agreement
that will supply IKEA with AirCarbon from Newlight’s
commercial-scale production facilities and enable IKEA
to produce AirCarbon thermoplastic under a technology
license.
Under the agreement, IKEA will purchase 50 % of
the material from Newlight’s 23,000 tonnes per year
plant in the United States, and subsequently IKEA has
exclusive rights in the home furnishings industry to use
Newlight’s carbon capture technology to convert biobased
greenhouse gases, first from biogas and later
from carbon dioxide, into AirCarbon thermoplastics for
use in its home furnishing products. Both the companies
will work together to identify and select the low cost
carbon sources and development of the technology to
use a range of renewable substrates, with a long term
goal to develop capacities up to 453,000 tonnes per year.
The AirCarbon plants are initially intended to run using
biogas from landfills as their sole carbon feedstock
inputs, with expansion into other AirCarbon feedstocks
over time, such as carbon dioxide.
Minh Nguyen Hoang,
Category Manager
of Plastics at IKEA of
Sweden says: “IKEA
wants to contribute
to a transformational
change in the industry
and to the development
of plastics made from
renewable sources.
In line with our
sustainability goals, we are moving away from virgin fossil
based plastic materials in favor of plastic produced from
renewable sources such as biogas, sugar wastes, and other
renewable carbon sources. We believe our partnership
with Newlight has the potential, once fully scaled, to be
an important component of our multi-pronged effort to
provide IKEA’s customers with affordable plastics products
made from renewable resources.”
Added CEO of Newlight, Mark Herrema: “IKEA’s
partnership with Newlight marks an important shift in
how the world can make materials: from fossil fuels to
captured carbon, from consumption to generation, from
depletion to restoration. IKEA is a leader in the concept
of harnessing its operations to improve the world, and
we are proud to be a part of that effort.”
IKEA’s long-term ambition is for all the plastic material
used in their home furnishing products to be renewable
or recycled material. The company is starting with their
home furnishing plastic products, representing about
40 % of the total plastic volume used in the IKEA range.”
KL/MT
www.ikea.com | www.newlight.com
bioplastics MAGAZINE [02/16] Vol. 11 7