Metabolix,
a bioscience company focused on delivering sustainable solutions for plastics,
chemicals and energy, announced on March 26, 2013 that it has signed a
distribution agreement with Tianjin GreenBio Materials Co., Ltd. (GreenBio).
Under the terms of the agreement, Metabolix will distribute GreenBio's SoGreen™
heat shrink film in Europe and will be the exclusive distributor in America. In
addition, they have also signed a supply agreement for PHA biopolymers,
according to CCM’s latest
monthly report, Biomaterials China
News issued in June.
According
to Bob Engle, the vice president of the business & commerce department of
Metabolix, the distribution and PHA supply agreements will extend the range and
availability of Metabolix's PHA products. Lu Weichuan, chairman and chief
executive officer of GreenBio, said that working with Metabolix can gain
greater exposure for GreenBio's products in America and Europe. The cooperation
between GreenBio and Metabolix will be an encouragement for the domestic PHA
industry, indicating that China's PHA industry enters a new stage of
development.
Actually,
China is a leader in the research and commercial production of PHA in the
world. According to the secretary general of Shenzhen Plastics Industry
Association, PHA is a general name of polyhydroxyalkanoates materials, and
there have been four generations for industrial PHA products at present. A
representative product of the first generation is PHB homopolymer, and the
brittleness limits the large-scale use of this product. In order to improve the
processing ability of PHA, other generations of PHA have been developed, such
as PHBV, PHBHHX and P34HB.
At
present, domestic major institutes involved in the development of PHA include
Tsinghua University, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
(CAS), Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, CAS, and Shantou University.
The major companies engaged in industrial production of PHA include GreenBio,
TianAn Biologic Materials Co., Ltd. (TianAn Bio), Shandong Ecomann Technology
Co., Ltd. (Ecomann) and Shandong Lukang Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (Lukang
Pharmaceutical). These institutes and companies have cooperated with each other
in recent years to achieve significant improvement in the PHA industry. The
above-mentioned companies have put several production lines into operation, but
currently they are cautious toward the PHA capacity expansion.
It's
believed that three factors may prompt the biodegradable PHA
plastics to be gradually accepted by consumers. Firstly, the
production cost of PHA plastics is close to that of petroleum-based plastics.
Generally, the cost of bio-degradable plastics is several times higher than
that of general plastics, but now the technological improvement helps cut the
cost of bio-degradable plastics. Secondly, the properties of some PHA plastics
are similar to those of the general PP and PE, such as Ecomann's P34HB
plastics. Besides, there are more than 150 kinds of PHA monomers which can be
used to produce various kinds of plastics, meeting special demands for
elasticity and plasticity, so the application scope of PHA plastics is nearly
as wide as that of general plastics. Thirdly, the people's awareness of
environmental protection improves, helping increase domestic demand for
biodegradable materials, such as agricultural film which can be degradable in
the soil. It's reported that Ecomann's PHA agricultural film and pesticide
packaging have been promoted in Jining, Shandong Province with the help of
local government in the first half of 2013.
PHA
is mainly used to produce tableware, lunch box, pharmaceutical packaging and
agricultural film. Currently, domestic consumption volume of PHA is about
3,000t/a, while domestic PHA capacity is about 22,000t/a. In this context, the
cooperation between domestic PHA producers and foreign companies will help
promote the large-scale application of PHA products and accelerate the
development of the domestic PHA industry.
China's
PHA industry enters new stage of development
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Biomaterials
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