Issue 03/2016

Basics
By:
Jan Ravenstijn
Senior consultant Biopolymers and
Industrial R&D management
Meerssen, The Netherlands
In 2015, however, the PHA scene began to turn around:
more players became active at an industrial level, lower PHA
prices were being offered, sales volume began to develop
and a large number of value chain alliances across the whole
value chain came about. All these accelerated the global
market acceptance and penetration of PHA products.
Today there are more than 30 companies active in
development, manufacturing and scale-up of PHA products.
Several of those decided to make and market their own PHAcompounds
since they do not always have good experiences
working with compounding companies. A CEO of one of the
companies mentioned: “Most compounders do not properly
process my PHA polymers, despite instructions on how to do
it, so I decided to develop and to produce compounds myself
and bring those to the market”.
The PHA polymer platform development has been
dominated by Technology Push for a long time based on a
“Look what we can do” attitude and backed by local and by
country governments appreciating the environmental benefits
and often the start of an after-use value chain, but without
sufficient understanding of the requirements for Market Pull.
Often the golden rule for a new polymer was ignored:
Build demand before you build capacity
The last five years also several players came to the market
demonstrating the understanding for the need of a broad
range of applications at a competitive market price. Although
they admit that their cost position will not be optimal in the first
years, they show faith in where they can be when the technology
is at large industrial scale, like 100,000 tonnes/annum plants.
Manufacturing cost quotes of EUR 1.20/kg have already been
given based on which PHA polymer pricing could be between
EUR 1.60 and EUR 2.00/kg in such case.
Prices of the fossil-based polymers PHA competes with
currently run between EUR 1.10 and EUR 2.00/kg. So the
PHA prices are still high in the range, but close enough to get
significant market penetration from a polymer cost perspective.
However, there are also PHA suppliers who are more careful to
indicate where they think the ultimate market price can go.
Although the PHA product family cannot fully substitute
any of the traditional fossil-based polymer families, it can
partly substitute many of them, so the accessible market for
PHA is very large and could become hundreds of kilotonnes
per annum, provided the cost/performance balance is OK.
Depending on the PHA type and grade it can be used for
injection moulding (see figure 3), sheet and film extrusion,
thermoforming, foam, non-wovens, fibers, 3D-printing,
paper coating, glues, binders, adhesives, as additive for
reinforcement or plasticization or as building block in UPRs
for paint or in PUR for foam. Most of these application
developments (see figure 4) are embryonic or early-growth.
PHAs can be used in most thermoplastic and
thermoset market segments
A new value chain is created for PHA polymers. Often, but
not always it’s based on an after-use value chain utilizing
components of a variety of waste streams. Also in other
cases we see that the first few positions in the value chain
(raw material, fermentative polymer production) are taken by
parties who are unfamiliar with the plastics business. During
the last two years about 5 companies have made significant
progress in forming alliances across the entire value
chain in order to accelerate their product and application
developments.
Companies developing PHA manufacturing technology
formed alliances with OEMs, both for thermoplastics
70
Figure 2:
Differences between
several PHA
products.
Melt Temperature (°C)
200
190
180
170
160
150
140
130
120
110
100
0
PHB
PHBD
PHBV
PHBHx
PHBO
PHBHx
PHBO
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
3HA Content (mol%)
Crystallinity (%)
60
PHB
PHBV
50
PHBO
40
PHBHx
30
PHBOd
20
10
0
0 5 10 15 20 25
3HA Content (mol%)
bioplastics MAGAZINE [03/16] Vol. 11 39