Food processors, farms and municipalities all have felt pressures to send less organic material to landfills. They could eventually get help from a startup in California that is turning organics into biodegradable plastic.
Polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) plastic was first developed in the 1980s. The fully biodegradable polymer is produced by bacteria, and traditionally, the feedstock for the material has been corn sugars or seed oil. The price to produce crop-based PHA can fluctuate depending on market prices.
However, Richmond, Calif.-based Full Cycle Bioplastics is making PHA with organic discards – things like food scraps, agricultural byproducts, even dirty cardboard.
Food companies could close the loop
CEO Andrew Falcon said the Full Cycle biorefining process can be used by food processors and other food scrap generators to help them turn a waste product into a valuable material. He cited Taylor Farms, a vegetable processor and bagged-salad retailer based in Salinas, Calif., as an example.
“They could take their own agriculture food waste from their manufacturing process, convert it into PHA biopolymer and then have that PHA biopolymer used to make a bag that they could sell their lettuce in on the retail shelf,” Falcon said. He added Full Cycle also plans to work with haulers to take their organic material.
The company notes its PHA plastic is highly compostable and degradable.
“It will compost well in industrial compost environments, but also, in the case of PHAs, if [the plastic materials] end up in a marine environment, they’ll also degrade naturally, leaving no residue,” said Falcon. “The bacteria that produce it are in existence all around the world, very commonly used with wastewater treatment systems.”
PHA has not been commercially produced, largely due to high costs. Crop-based PHA can cost up to four times more than petro-based plastics, said Falcon, making it unattractive to packagers and manufacturers. He said his operation has a long way to go before its product is available, but he thinks Full Cycle’s PHA can be cost-competitive because of the low cost feedstock and a less intense refining process.
In very simple terms, here’s how the process works: the organic waste gets broken down and consumed by bacteria, which naturally produce PHA. Falcon said Full Cycle has a way to manipulate the bacteria so each cell mass resulting from the process is primarily PHA. At that point, the cell is ready to be used in compounds or extracted to produce a resin with more clarity. It can also be manipulated to create other polymers in the PHA family.
“It can either complement or replace sort of a broad spectrum of petro-based products,” said Falcon.
Backing from investment firm
Currently, Full Cycle is producing PHA on a lab scale only. Full Cycle was established in 2012 and in 2014 received seed funding from investment firm Fifth Season Ventures. Full Cycle is in the process of expanding via a partnership with University of California, Davis, which had extra space and equipment available for use.
Falcon hopes in the next six months Full Cycle will be able to produce 25 to 50 pounds of PHA a day. The polymer could have a wide range of product and packaging applications.
“You can injection-mold it, you can extrude it, you can thermoform it, it’s been blown into films, it can be used for compostable bags, it could be used for disposable cutlery and rigid food packaging,” Falcon said. “The potential is there to recover and reuse and recapture more of the value from the plastics industry, which to this point, has not recaptured, recovered or reutilized value in the same way metals or paper have.”
In September, Full Cycle will be participating in a startup accelerator with Think Beyond Plastic.
