By EduTransfer Design Associates and Haywire Creative
A specialty chemicals biomaterials company, EcoSynthetix Inc. of Burlington, Ontario focuses on developing green alternatives to petrochemical products. Using field crops such as corn, tapioca and potatoes, they have developed a proprietary process to produce coatings and adhesives that can replace petroleum based products.
"Our main market today is in the coated paper industry, which is a fairly large industry dominated by petroleum based binders," explains CEO John van Leeuwen. "To achieve the high quality offset printing used for magazines, color printed materials and packaging, the paper requires a coating to make it smooth, white and printable."
The paper industry has traditionally relied on petroleum based coatings or binders made from different types of polymers such as styrene butadiene latex and styrene acrylic latex. "The polymer latex industry is enormous, with over 16 billion pounds of petroleum based latex used in products annually," explains van Leeuwen. "The global paper coating industry uses over 4 billion pounds of synthetic binders annually, valued at approximately $5 billion US."
EcoSynthetix has invented a high tech biolatex® binder produced from renewable feedstocks as an alternative to petrochemical binders used in the coated paper industry. EcoSphere®, the first biolatex product by EcoSynthetix, is a dry biopolymer nanoparticle agglomerate powder that can be used dry or pre-dispersed in water. This product has performance capabilities equal to or greater than the standard petroleum oil based products at a lower price. Biolatex binders improve sustainability, reduce costs and reduce the carbon footprint.
"Research has shown that EcoSphere® can replace up to 100 % of petroleum latexes used in a number of paper industry applications," says van Leeuwen. "The use of a biolatex binder has several environmental benefits for companies including significant greenhouse gas emission reductions and higher usage of recycled fiber, as well as reduced production costs." EcoSynthetix currently uses a toll manufacturer in Dyersburg Tennessee to produce its products, and is looking at building a plant in Canada in the next year or two and likely one in Europe.
"We have some very large customers including Nippon Paper Industries in Japan and FutureMark Paper Company in the US and ship to other companies in Japan, Indonesia, China and Latin America," says van Leeuwen. "We started this journey over 10 years ago and are one of the forerunners in this biobased materials industry, which we expect to grow very quickly as the world moves away from petroleum and towards more sustainable products." In the future, EcoSynthetix may expand the range of crops it uses to produce starch for biolatex products.
"Over time, we expect the industry to work directly with farmers to grow specialty crops," explains van Leeuwen. "For example, we are looking at specialty potatoes currently being grown in Europe that are high in a particular kind of starch that is very useful for specialty chemicals such as ours. These specialty potatoes are not needed for food consumption and do not have desired food traits, but they do have specific chemistries that make them very interesting for biomaterials." Ecosynthetix is working on bringing these specialty seedling potatoes from Europe to Canada over the next couple of years.
"One of the biggest things for a new company is to stay focused, so our main target for now is the paper industry,” says van Leeuwen. “We are also working with others to expand into other markets such as building materials, personal care, textiles and other possibilities."
This article first appeared on Farmcentre.com and is the property of the Canadian Farm Business Management Council.