Issue 06/2020

Bioplastics from Waste streams
By:
Guillaume Lebouteiller
Technical and Collaborative Projects Manager
NaturePlast SAS
Ifs, France
Today, most PHAs are produced from corn starch,
vegetable oils or sugars (sugar cane or sugar beet), sources
of biomass that could be seen as in competition with food.
So, to use resources from waste could be a solution to have
less impact on the environment: no competition with food
and less production of raw materials.
To produce PHA, bacteria present in the sewage or solid
organic waste are fed so that they accumulate PHA that will
be later extracted and then purified.
The PHA produced in these projects will be used for
different applications: cosmetic packaging, agricultural
films, and plastic bags. NaturePlast is the leader of R&D
operations for the formulation and compound production
based on the PHAs produced in these projects. Thanks to
its expertise and dedicated equipment, NaturePlast will
process and characterize the PHAs obtained from urban
waste to meet the desired properties of the end-products
selected.
Each of these projects aims to demonstrate the technoeconomic
and environmental viability of the conversion
of waste streams into valuable bioproducts. In top of the
technical and economic aspects, they will work on the
legislation as well as on the social impacts. Basically the
projects will work on the whole value-chains: from the
waste streams to the end-products.
Waste and by-products as fillers
Since 2015 NaturePlast has also been developing
and producing a range of Biocomposites consisting of
compounds of bioplastics and renewable fillers such
as vegetal fibres or by-products / waste from different
industries.
A by-product is an intentional and inevitable material
created during the production of the main product. For the
manufacturers, the recovery of waste and by-products is a
major environmental and economic growing issue. These
by-products and the vegetal fibres mainly come from the
French territory but the concept may be duplicated where
needed.
The objective is thus to incorporate by-products or local
waste materials in different polymers to study the feasibility
of a circular economy and recovery of waste material.
By-products and waste are selected according to their
industrial viability, in terms of volumes, quality and mostly
the maturity of the whole value-chain.
These by-products are today mainly sourced from agrifood
industries or agricultural activities. Seashells, algae,
shells, kernels, cereal grains, coffee grounds as well as
different vegetal fibres (wood, flax, hemp, miscanthus, etc.)
Figure 2: URBIOFIN modules
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