If you want to make, say, a new plastic from biobased materials, you need to master not one, but at least two new technologies.
If you want to make, say, a new plastic from biobased materials, you need to master not one, but at least two new technologies.
First get a suitable monomer and then produce the polymer with the desired properties. Companies that have promising monomers already often lack the facilities to test polymerization on a larger scale. So the thing to do is to build a pilot to get the needed expertise. Not only newbies, even old hands at polymerization, like Sabic do that (in Chemelot). Avantium does the same in Delfzijl, to get the kinks out of their Zambezi process.
By the way, both were built by Zeton.
Now the Biobased Performance Materials research program leads an initiative to start 2 open access pilot facilities in the Netherlands. While such facilities are too expensive for individual companies, these plants can be used by multiple companies. Several larger and smaller companies have shown interest already.
The 2 facilities that are planned for Etten-Leur and Emmen can connect to the existing industrial infrastructure that is present already, which makes it easier to continue on a promising concept. These pilot facilities can enhance the speed of development of biobased materials.
