A Hurdle for New Biobased Plastics

Degradable or otherwise and consumer packaged goods

There has always been this promise on the horizon of sustainable green chemistry incubating some technology that will save us from the deluge of plastic waste littering our beaches and remove our dependence on oil. This is the holy grail for polymer chemists focused on sustainability. The challenge is not invention. That part is relatively easy.

Tom Richardson @TRichAlchemist

@TPolymerist Plant based meat developments/challenges/opportunities Who is actually using biobased plastics like PEF, PLA, etc and what are current challenges for future adoption around performance, price, others

This post will I think conclude this series of reader prompted writing for now, but I’ll try and make this one extra special (I’m just saying that having no idea if I’ll deliver).

Three Main Hurdles

Let’s say we’ve invented an amazing new polymer together here together. We put our heads together and we finally figured out a way to make a synthetic polymer just like high density polyethylene (HDPE) from a sugar AND it’s also biodegradable in nature after a few years just like a fungus would slowly decompose a tree. No microplastics after degradation and the physical properties are an exact match for HDPE. This sounds amazing right? Well, it is amazing (go us), but getting this baby commercialized is going to be a challenge.

I’ve thought about this a lot and there are three main hurdles that we would now have to overcome to take volume away from our older petrochemical sibling:

1. Price

2. Performance

3. Convincing Consumers

Let’s Talk About Price

Our super cool polymer is made from sugar. It could be from fermentation like Metabolix or Danimer or maybe we chemically turned it into something like isosorbide and then made some polyesters or something. How we got here isn’t necessarily that important, but making it from sugar is a key thing to think about.

What does sugar actually cost? Well, if we look at sugar pricing (and lets say this number is accurate from this source for sucrose) we might be paying $0.22/lb for sugar or 22 cents. We might be able to get that price even lower if we could utilize something like beet molasses, a byproduct of sugar refining, but the price of sugar is what we might have to index the cost of our polymer to from a raw material perspective. But, we still have to transform our sugar into our polymer which costs money.

Our competition, high density polyethylene, costs about $1216/ton or about $0.60/lb. If we want to be competitive with HDPE we should seriously think about selling at the same price if we truly want to change the world for the better. If our sugar costs us $0.22/lb and the finished good of our competition costs $0.60/lb then that leaves us about $0.38/lb where we need to squeeze in both our cost AND our profit margin. If we can get our manufacturing costs to about $0.19/lb for our polymer this leaves us $0.19/lb of gross margin. This is about 30% gross margin. We would still need to deduct our selling and general administrative costs, and R&D costs. If we are really disciplined maybe we can get 15-20% EBITDA to return to our shareholders? Maybe we can cut R&D to increase our margins and make our investors happy?

My point here is that $0.19 cents is a crazy low cost of production. Our process would need to be so efficient that we would probably have to piping in some beet molasses from a sugar refinery to our plant where we do our black box science stuff and we just churn out super high quality and pure polymer on the other side continuously. Oh, and we cannot mess up our production process because that leads to scrap and scrap directly goes to decreasing our EBITA.

But, let’s say we figure all that out because we have super smart chemical engineers and everyone has a Six Sigma Black Belt (even our quality techs).

Performance and Convincing Consumers

In our infinite wisdom as the most supreme polymer chemists on this side of the internet we knew that before we raised money from our infinitely wise investors that our polymer could meet the performance standard of high density polyethylene. Here’s our imaginary specification sheet compared to HDPE

From a physical and thermal properties standpoint we copied and matched the properties 100% for HDPE, but because our polymer is degradable through fungi (let’s say there is a special enzyme in the fungi) we are not so great at resistance to acids, bases, or fungi. Our one benefit might be resistance to things like aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons due to having those bonds that can be broken down by the fungi. Did we make a polyester or a polyamide or a polyether? Not really important for this exercise, but yeah if you care about that stuff fill in the blank.

The point is we match from a “pull it till it breaks” perspective, but our resistance to solvents and fungi are just a bit different. But we COST THE SAME as high density polyethylene. Actually, we are so brilliant that we could tune the properties of our polymer in a few years we might be able to achieve properties similar to low density polyethylene or medium density polyethylene and keep our costs fixed. Polyethylene, your days are numbered pal. Technically, we are essentially genius level polymer chemists at this point am I right?

We have our costs and performance locked down and now it’s time to go sell this stuff. I mean, at this point it could probably sell itself right?

This is where it gets tricky, but we are technically brilliant so we know a lot of the end use cases for high density polyethylene or even just polyethylene in general. Shell told us the market for HDPE is growing at a 4% CAGR (compound annual growth rate), so it’s not exactly a “growth sector,” but it is growing ever so slowly. We know our end markets for our polymer are places such as:

• Food packaging (milk jugs)

• Consumer packaged good packaging (the stuff that goes around your stuff)

• Medical equipment (hospital beds, bed pans, etc)

• Personal care product packaging (those little bottles with moisturizer)

• Construction products (waterproofing for your roof or foundation)

• Electrical insulation (the stuff that goes over wires)

• Aerospace interiors (overhead luggage storage)

At this point it’s a sales pitch to these traditional customers on trying a switch to our new polymer. We might have the best sales people, but I can already hear the hesitancy in our would be customers wanting to adopt to our new polymer.

• Food packaging: So your polymer degrades by being food for fungi. Does that mean fungi will be growing in the food it’s packaged with?

• Consumer packaged good packaging: Actually, this sounds great please give this to us

• Medical equipment: So, how long till it starts to degrade? Can we sterilize it?

• Personal care product packaging: Is this resistant to hyaluronic acid?

• Construction products: Our customers want our products to last a lifetime

• Electrical insulation: Will this degrade in the walls of a house? Is this a fire hazard?

• Aerospace interiors: Does your stuff burn? Can we load it with fire retardant?

The only end application where I couldn’t think of any hesitancy to try our polymer out would be in consumer packaged goods packaging. Also, probably the better place to take it would be disposable food containers such as coffee cups or single serving utensils. Even using this in a consumer packaged good itself (like a child’s toy) might be problematic. Can you imagine putting a toy made of this stuff in a box for a year or two and opening it to find it growing fungi? Might as well be a cold open for The Last Of Us.

Getting cost and physical properties to be the same as HDPE would essentially require technical and process genius. It’s not impossible, but it would require some genius. Even if we could get there converting the people who already use HDPE or something similar would be very difficult. Even if we got some companies to work with us they would then need to convince their consumers (the general public) and sell them too.

I mean, it sounds like our actual problem is this whole “degradation in the environment thing.” Maybe we should figure out an anti-fungal coating too?

This is all just a hypothetical exercise, but it’s based on my experience in doing the whole “new product development” process for polymers. In this hypothetical scenario we might have found more success in going to talk to our potential customers before we ever synthesized anything in the lab or worked on being able to match physical properties or using sugar as a feedstock.

Often, in the case of plastic it gets used because it doesn’t degrade AND because it’s also really cheap. If we want plastic to stop making its way into our water systems and onto beaches and into animals and into humans then it sounds more like a regulatory or policy problem than something technical.

I’m not saying new biobased polymers are impossible to commercialize, but they need to be able to compete on price and performance and once you can do that you need to get your customers to agree to try it and eventually buy it. It’s why it might be easier in the short term to make a polymer that already exists from biomass as opposed to inventing a new one.

You come at the king you best not miss,

Tony