New home-compostable biomaterial to stop plastic pollution
If we make a product from polypropylene today, it will take 200 - 450 years to disappear according to the decomposition time estimation.
Industry produces about 300M tones of plastic annually. And the number is still increasing. Most of them are single use products mainly used as a packaging material. Unfortunatelly material recycling has its limits. I would like to introduce a project which aims to replace products made from plastic by home compostable biomaterial. How? Read attachment :)
Cross-border/international
Czechia
Other
Switzerland
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It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
Agricultural waste and side streams are highly abundant resources, not competing with arable land. Such sources can be valorized into new materials similar to plastic, which can then be processed on standard industrial machinery at scale. This proposal is focusing on fast disposable products such as candle cups, KEG caps for beverage metal tank container packaging, spools for fabric and threads and spools for 3d-printing filaments. Replacing such products with safe innovative materials based on renewable biomass contributes to reducing plastic pollution, sparing arable land and reducing deforestation.
After use, the products can be home composted or if they land into the environment, they will biodegrade within few months. Currently we have different material formulations, which do not contain any petrochemicals or toxic additives. I am applying for Bauhaus awards to raise more awarness to the topic of compostable biodegradable products, which can act as drop-on solutions for at scale plastics. This award would also enable further material optimization and initial certification of the material.
biodegradable material
agricultural waste streams
home compostable
fast disposables
waste management
Single use packaging material and other fast disposalbe items are contributing the plastic pollution. An example of such a product are plastic containers for single use candles. The candle industry is a multi-billion dollar global market. Poland is one of the biggest producers of candles in Europe and worldwide. Alone the polish candle industry is responsible for a yearly production of around 300M candle containers. Replacing this amount of candle containers with Groam’s alternative sustainable material would spare more than 1,5M tons of plastic if we assume a common container weight of five grams. Groam’s material is a sustainable alternative based on European biomass side stream sources, not competing with arable land. Groam’s materials behave very similar to plastic, are fire-resistant and biodegradable. This is why Groam sees the candle container industry as a good beachhead market. However, Groam plans to apply the material across the single use and fast disposalbe sector. Other examples of planed products are: filament or thread plastic spools, KEG tank lids or lids for cosmetics and food containers and many more, all produced in millions annually by single companies.
Groam is today focusing on impact and delivering sustainable fast disposalbes to the customers, end-users and beneficiaries. This way Groam contributes to reducing plastic pollution. This implies that Groam preferably focuses on technical large scale high volume products. Our products need to have a certain technical performance and a function. This does not mean however that aesthetics and quality of experience are not an important aspect of Groam’s products and vision. Since our material is resourced from cereal biomass, its natural neutral beige to light-brown color resembles nature and gives the user a better feeling than a classical shiny red grave-candle container. Our product is perceived similarly as when comparing bees wax to parrafin, a cork to a plastic spurt or a parqeut to
a linoleum floor. Based on a survey we made, people generally prefered the natural look of our product. Some people however preferred our product colored. We realised this way, there are different ways people perceive our product for different applications and can adjust to their taste, need and design forms that follow function. Apart from the color, our product can also be lighter than plastic and has a very smooth surface. In some of our applications, we add wooden, coffee or
other natural fillers to create an even more natural looking effect. Our objectives are to make the product lighter, while achieving a smooth surface to spare even more material. We need feedback from our users to further improve our features and aesthetics.
In Europe sustainability is receiving lots of attention. The Green Deal packaging initiative is a good example of European legislation supporting plastic reduction. The general public also perceives sustainability, plastic reduction and circular economy positively. Still, bioplastics are mostly three times more expensive given a not well established resource, production process and small scale. We believe Europe is a pioneer of sustainability compared to the USA, Brazil, Africa or Asia, where we are
also tracking market trends related to Groam. The willingness to pay a surplus for sustainable materials is still rather scarce. With our current supply chain and low production volumes, the cost of our material is about 10x that of conventional polymers such as polypropylene. The aim is to reduce the price by scaling up production to achive competitive price on the market within 2 years. For this we are scaling up at the moment and demonstrating the solution to big biomass producers in Europe, with whom we would like to partner in 2024. We do not plan to build up a factory. Instead, we plan to include exisiting players within the supply chain. We have know how on how to use specific biomass streams in a circular manner. We are presenting this to our partners, who could easily help us scale our solution. In the next step, we will outsource the conversion of these materials and the production of products out of them.
The benefit for the society and environment are renewable resources originating from waste and side streams. Such resources do not compete with taking up further arable land. Preferably, our resources are also not coming from food crops but from technical crops not meant for human consumption. Another benefit is that our solution is local. We plan to distribute products within an EU based material supply chain. The final products should be distributed in a 500 km area. The final products can be home or industrially composted. We are thinking about offering a service to manage correct waste disposal and garuanteeing to close the technical and ecological loops. We believe, this can be achieved already today in the sector of plastic fast disposables. In this sector Groam can demonstrate impact independent of the upcoming EU directives for packaging and further plastic bans. For accelerating the impact, we plan to certify our material for food and cosmetics contact, for compostability as well as the flustix plastic free product.
The idea originated from a PhD completed at ETH Zurich. The PhD work was focusing on a new foaming technology for biomaterials. The foaming technology was intented to be used for foaming of new sustainable materials that would reduce plastic production. Such sustainable materials were however non-existent and it became difficult to find a supplier, who could deliver materials at scale for testing. Groam Tech AG set off the design their own proprietary materials based on renewable biomass originating from industrial crops. Groam Tech AG is today working on R&D and IP and is supported from ETH Zurich, a well reknowned university worldwide. We are also in touch with plastic producers providing injection moulding machines (CZ), providers of candles (CZ),
providers of 3D printing machines, filaments and services (CZ) and suppliers of the biomass (7.6B EUR revenue, DE). With this combination of partners and stakeholders, we set a solid basis for demonstrating a viable supply chain in the EU and creating and testing first products on the market.
The concept of circular mateirals based on renewable biomass streams requires a multidisciplinary approach. The idea originated from an academic reserach involving thermodynamics, food science, multiphase flow, study of highly viscous materials flow in high-pressure environments and mechanical engineering. Later material scienece and interactions of biomass compounds on a molecular and macroscopic level became relevant for the design of material formulation behaving simialarly to plastics and being processable on plastic industrial machinery, product development and mechanical engineering in order to find suitable technology. As a graduated mechanical engineer with experience from automotive industry and my own project Plastmakers I joined the project to bridge the processing of the materials at pilot scale to industrial scale. I brought the expertise of manual production of simple prototypes on simple machines using my mechanical engineering background. With these tests, we were able to progress to production of samples and small products on standard industrial machines. Apart from technical disciplines, the cocept is focusing on the economical and environmental contrigution. We are using the concept of financial modelling combined with Life Cycle Assessment analysis. We are trying further to commercialize our R&D and thereby win valuable partners helping us bring first products to the market, to the end-users and to our beneficiaries.
Not all biopolymers can be easily home compostable (example PLA). Our concept uses resources from biomass converting them into new products which can biodegrade. Furthermore, the mateirals are not plastic but behave similarly. They can also be processed on standard machines available in the industry at scale. The materials further have special properties, like fire resistance.
Big advantage of this concept is that it can be replicated worldwide. Essential key to success is to have material fomulation with well known material properties and tested parameters for production. At this moment we are in contact with potential partners in the North America, Brazil, South Africa. With knowledge and experience this concept can be transfered anywhere with a sufficient material supply chain and access to technology for material processing. From the environmental perspective it makes sence to provide our IP to other partners and ensure production where will be needed in order to save resources and green house gass emisions related with transportation.
This concept reduces plastic pollution and its aim is to set a new material supply chain in Europe. Later it can be transferred to other world regions. In the long term it can be a game changer for developing countries with poor or none existing plastic waste management, which struggle with plastic pollution. It is a good opportunity to use resources from agricultural products locally without the need of global logistic systems for raw materials and products usually made by petrochemical industry.
