Bio-elastics ripe for adoption

The shopping list for renewable diaper components will soon be almost complete, opening up the route for hygienic disposables manufacturers to meet their long-term sustainability objectives perhaps sooner than even they imagined.

In addition to bio-based nonwovens, plastics, superabsorbent polymers and packaging, new stretch elastics will soon be widely available.

BioAmber, headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is on course to open its new manufacturing plant for bio-based 1,4-butanediol (BDO) next year, while BASF is now making samples of it available for customer trials.

BioAmber has exclusively licensed DuPont’s hydrogenation catalyst technology to convert bio-based succinic acid to BDO, which is widely used to manufacture tetrahydrofuran (THF), as the feedstock for elastic fibres, as well as other performance polymers. An exclusive partnership with chemicals major Evonik to optimise these DuPont catalysts and further improve their performance and economics. BioAmber has also been working with several third parties to validate the technology’s performance and expects its bio-based BDO to be commercially available in 2014.

And in May this year, BASF announced plans to begin the production of BDO based on renewable feedstock using the patented process of Genomatica, based in San Diego, California.

This one-step fermentation process is based on sugars as the feedstock.

BASF currently produces synthetic BDO and BDO-equivalents at its sites in the US, Germany, Japan, Malaysia and China and currently has an annual capacity of 535,000 metric tons. It has recently announced the intention of building a new BDO complex in China with a further capacity of 100,000 annual metric tons.

The route to 100% renewable hygienic dispoables, it appears, could be closer than previously thought.

Further details will be supplied at the forthcoming INSIGHT conference in St Pete’s, Florida.