An opening ceremony for Novamont’s €100 million renewable bio-butanediol (BDO), an important intermediary product for the production of compostable plastics, has taken place Bottrighe, Italy.
Attending the opening, WMW was told that the plant is the first commercial scale facility of its type in the world and will produce some 30,000 tonnes per year of low impact BDO.
With an estimated market of €3.5 billion, and a vast range of applications, the chemical intermediate butanediol, has until now only been obtained industrially using fossil sources.
Representing an investment of over €100 million, the Mater-Biotech plant is located in a converted abandoned factory, thanks to a partnership with Californian biotech firm, Genomatica.
Technology
Using technology developed by Genomatica, Novamont said that it has developed a biotechnological platform which takes sugars and transforms them into bio-butanediol through the action of suitably engineered e.coli type bacteria.
The combination of Novamont’s industrial research and Genomatica’s technology was said to have given rise to a product which will be produced on an industrial scale with CO2 savings of at least 50%.
The environmental sustainability of Novamont’s bio-butanediol has also enhanced by designing the plant to reutilise the by-products derived from the process in order to meet the plant’s energy requirements with an onsite digestion and biogas CHP facility.
Economic Model
Currently with a market of 1.5 million tonnes worth approximately €3.5 billion per year, it is estimated that the market for butanediol will grow to 2.7 million tonnes and more than €6.5 billion by 2020.
According to Novamont, when put into the context of its integrated bio-refinery project, the scope of this innovation goes beyond the availability of new technologies, bio-based products and the contribution these can make to the need to “decarbonise”.
With the opening of the Mater-Biotech plant, Novamont said that it has added a fundamental element to its model for a bioeconomy which it interprets as the regeneration of local areas, taking over abandoned factories or sites in serious difficulty and regenerating them as “true and proper infrastructures of the bioeconomy”.
The company added that projects such as this are a means of multiplying opportunities in the bioplastics and chemicals fields, for new entrepreneurial initiatives, for the creation of jobs and for a future with greater environmental and social sustainability.
“Mater-Biotech is just one facet of a system of world leader, interconnected plants to be seen as a formidable accelerator,” explained Catia Bastioli, Novamont CEO,
“It’s a way of multiplying opportunities in the bioplastics and chemicals fields for the producers of raw materials, for the producers of finished products, for new entrepreneurial initiatives, for the creation of jobs, and for those who are concerned about planning a future with greater environmental and social sustainability,” continued the CEO.
Novamont said that it has already revitalised six such sites and has fine-tuned four technologies which can be multiplied in accordance with its model for a bio-refinery integrated with the local area, in which technologies and products are developed to provide concrete solutions to large-scale problems such as the recycling of organic waste.
“Mater-Biotech, together with the Novamont research centres in Piana di Monte Verna and Novara, represents a formidable platform for industrial biotechnologies, from basic research to flagship plants”, concluded Bastioli, “a major opportunity to create competitive edge in partnership with other entities in the academic and industrial sectors.”
For more on the project don’t miss the November/December issue of Waste Management World.
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