Green Chemistry And Circular Economy News
Recent advances in the sustainable technology of our future
The Polymerist is a free newsletter that publishes twice a week with one in-depth article on Tuesdays and a roundup and honest analysis of what happened in the world of chemicals on Fridays. Join the subscriber list to get free updates with honest analysis from someone with a PhD in chemistry from the industry.
Administrative Note: I’ve been writing most of my Friday newsletters by just trying to find the latest news. I am going to attempt a different approach the next few months by making Fridays be centered around a theme. Each Friday will have a different theme till I run out and then cycle back through. Once I figure out a way to organize it I’ll communicate it to everyone. One drawback is that the news will not be as “fresh,” but it might be a more useful way for the audience to pick and choose what they read since I have heard two emails a week can be a lot.
Green Chemistry and Circular Economy News:
Covestro Renames TPU Portfolio
The polyurethane giant recently reported in their own newsletter that they are renaming their TPU line.
Covestro's family of partially bio-based thermoplastic polyurethanes (TPU) is now marketed under the name Desmopan® EC. Depending on the product hardness, up to 60 percent of the carbon content1 is derived from biomass.
A TPU is a Thermoplastic PolyUrethane and they are used in a variety of end markets such as footwear, clothing, medical devices, automotive interiors like imitation leather seats and dashboards, and adhesives. So if you are using Covestro TPUs as a professional chemist/scientist/engineer out there and you are using Desmopan EC you should ask what the renewable content of the TPU is and this may be a big benefit for your marketing colleagues. The majority of the Covestro biobased push comes from their biobased succinic acid and 1,4-butane diol, which are the building blocks for a polyester polyol called PolyButylene Succinate or PBS where the end groups of the polymer are alcohols that can react with an isocyanate to yield a urethane.
Novamont Acquires Biobag Group
Doris Guzman reported that Novamont acquired Biobag Group, which makes compostable thermoplastic bags. My curbside composting service here in Arlington, MA gives me a new biobag every week and depending on the temperatures outside our compostable bag can sometimes start composting with our compost before the compost gets picked up and I get a lot of murky liquid at the bottom of our composting bin. I can comment first hand that these bags definitely compost.
Yield10 Announces PHA Proof of Concept
If PHA sounds familiar its because it is due to Danimar Scientific going public via SPAC a few weeks ago. Polyhydroxyalkanoates or PHAs are what the company Metabolix was based on and Yield10 is the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Metabolix. Yield10 as far as I can tell was the agriculture focused part of Metabolix and their IP is centered around getting plants to produce PHAs and what enabled the start of this company focused on changing what plants produce with the CO2 they pull from the atmosphere.
Yield10 announced on January 19th their work on the oilseed Camelina sativa has yielded results of producing PHAs directly in the seed of the plant. Several variants of the plants were grown in the US and Canada and from the press release:
Based on these results, Yield10 has selected two PHA Camelina lines for larger scale field testing in 2021, pending the issuance of permits in the U.S. In addition to generating more data, Yield10 plans to determine the suitability of the lines for initial commercial activities. Each PHA application area has different price points and scale requirements, and will have different PHA content requirements for commercial launch. Based on this, Yield10 believes that PHA content in the range of 5 to 20 percent of mature seed weight in Camelina would address the range of target applications. Yield10 plans to extract the PHA bioplastic from the Camelina seed for product prototyping, sampling and business development.
Details on how Yield10 seeks to extract the PHA from the seed are unclear and one thing that biobased technologies based on plants have faced is the downstream processing part. I hope that Yield10 will have an efficient and easy to perform extraction of the PHA from the plant seeds.
In the near term Yield10 seeks to:
focused on launching our Camelina business to produce oil for renewable diesel and as a fish oil supplement for aquaculture feed, and developing the business plan for the recently obtained rights to the Camelina omega-3 (DHA+EPA) replacement fish oil under our recent agreements with Rothamsted Research. Based on its level of development, we believe the drop-in fish oil replacement technology is currently closer to commercialization and could provide some of the resources we will need to develop PHA in Camelina,” said Dr. Peoples.
Yield10 is based in Woburn, MA and are focused on getting plants to produce value add chemicals and plastics from CO2, water, and sunlight.
Audi Looking Towards Plastic Pyrolysis
Autocar journalists reported that Audi is investigating mixed plastic pyrolysis. The idea being that any sort of plastics that are broken, are in excess, or are coming off a pre-owned car, could be collectively pyrolyzed and turned into a product that could be sold back to a oil refiner/cracker who could turn it back into monomer/polymer.
Audi and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology will seek to convert them into pyrolysis oil, which can be used to make new plastic for cars, saving energy and cost. Audi’s head of procurement strategy, Marco Philippi, said: “We want to make efficient use of resources, and chemical recycling has great potential for this.”
This makes so much sense when I read about it. I was at a Center for Polyurethane Industries Conference back in 2018 and I attended a talk from a company that was looking at doing mechanical recycling of artificial leather dashboards, which are just very specialized polyurethanes. Melt processing polyurethanes is tricky, go too hot and it degrades and/or gels, it needs to be dried, and it can be really hard to cut into the right size to get back into an extruder.
DSM and Clariter Partner on Recycling Ultrahigh Molecular Weight Polyethylene
DSM has been shifting their business over the last few years to be more nutrition and life sciences focused, but they still have a few money making enterprises in advanced materials and specialty polymers. DSM sells UHMWPE or ultra high molecular weight polyethylene, a much longer version than high density polyethylene. Once the length of the polyethylene chain gets really long the interesting properties start to show up including chemical resistance, high strength, high, and high modulus. Read more about UHMWPE here.
DSM is actually the inventor of UHMWPE and they call it Dyneema. DSM is partnering with Clariter to try and recycle the material through Clariter’s 3 step chemical recycling process.
The positive results confirm the technical viability of transforming Dyneema®-based end-products into high-value, industrial grade, product families: oils, waxes, and solvents via Clariter’s patented 3-step chemical recycling process. These can be further used as ingredients to manufacture new end- and consumer products.
UHMWPE is somewhat difficult to produce so it makes sense that DSM might need a little extra help in figuring out the chemical recycling of the material and this is where Clariter’s expertise comes into play. This could be considered “specialty polymer chemical recycling.” DSM has already introduced a biobased feedstock for Dyneema and now they are going to have a potential end of life solution for their product now too.
University of Buffalo Gets Grant To Develop Plastic Sorting Robots
One issue with municipal waste sorting, specifically in plastics, is that it is labor intensive to sort the big six plastics into their respective recycling streams. The barrier of having specific types of plastics in isolated streams is potentially one reason why mechanical recycling has not gained more widespread adoption.
The National Science Foundation and the University of Buffalo seek to remedy this problem through a $2 million grant to develop automated sorting robots and a chemical recycling program focused on green and innovative solvents. The grant falls under the Engineering Frontiers in Research and Innovation.
In my mind I picture robots equipped with miniaturized Raman spectrometers that can quickly determine a plastic’s structure and sort it accordingly if they cannot find the actual recycling symbol. It will be interesting to see if this grant can actually develop plastic sorting robots. I think that once the plastic is sorted there are better ways to recycle the plastic than just dissolving them in solvent.
Clariant and Casale Develop More Efficient Haber-Bosch Catalyst and Process
Synthetic ammonia from the Haber-Bosch process is a very CO2 intensive reaction that enables the production of most of the world’s fertilizer. The Haber-Bosch process creates about 1% of global CO2 emissions according to C&EN and about 1.4% of the emissions per this citation in Joule. Either way, its a significant amount of CO2 and is considered one of the most emission intensive synthetic chemical reactions and processes in the world.
Clariant is one of the worlds largest ammonia catalyst producers in the world and they partnered with Casale who makes ammonia converters and together they came up with AmoMax in about four years from R&D to industrial implementation. Some benefits of the AmoMax technology:
The catalyst’s higher activity allows operation of the ammonia synthesis loop with considerably less pressure. This means the plant consumes less energy to produce ammonia, and hence generates less CO2 emissions.
Higher catalyst activity means higher conversion, so the plant will consume less energy for the recirculation of the process gas in the reactor loop. Again, less CO2 is emitted.
The combination of a higher active catalyst with the Casale design of converter internals makes the difference. This means, a typical ammonia plant producing 1600 tons/day, would save potentially US$ 300,000 annually on energy costs, and reduce CO2 emissions by up to 85,000 tons over the catalyst’s average lifetime of 15 years. Furthermore, AmoMax-Casale is capable of increasing the ammonia production capacity by up to 5%.
Clariant and Casale hit this one out of the park in my opinion. These companies are going to be printing money with this new technology and the Clariant divestments of the pigments and master batching businesses that I talked about a last week and might make more sense if they want to really double down on catalyst development and technology. The AmoMax technology has won awards from the Swiss Chemical Society and ICIS.
This is an example of chemical and chemical adjacent companies doing well by doing good.
Tony
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