Grantee Research Project Results
Final Report: Renewable Bioplastics Production
EPA Contract Number: 68HERC20C0004Title: Renewable Bioplastics Production
Investigators: Imam, Tahmina
Small Business: Altex Technologies Corporation
EPA Contact: Richards, April
Phase: II
Project Period: November 1, 2019 through October 31, 2021
Project Amount: $299,998
RFA: Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) - Phase II (2019) Recipients Lists
Research Category: Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)
Description:
This research work demonstrated technical, economic, and environmental feasibility of the Altex Renewable Bioplastics Production (RBP) process to produce Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) for Bioplastics production from lignocellulosic biomass. Under Phase I, the RPB process feasibility were shown at bench scale. While under Phase II, the RBP process was scaled-up and PHA was characterized for a potential plastics market application for future commercialization.
Currently, there is no process commercially existing in the world that has converted the whole biomass structure to bioplastics, but the Altex RBP process. Most existing processes whether in research or pilot scale are using sugars and vegetable oil to produce bioplastics. Altex's ability to use any waste lignocellulosic biomass (feedstock-flexibility), and more importantly the whole structure of the biomass for bioplastics production makes a significant contribution to the world, human health, environment, and EPA as we hope to replace non-biodegradable toxic plastics. Altex's PHA for bioplastics production is not only bio-based and renewable, but also biodegradable without the need for commercial biodegradation facility. Final bioplastics application and market can be the enormous packaging industry and/or biomedical usage plastics based on Phase II PHA production.
The RBP technology uses: first, biomass densification and storage to lower transportation and storage cost; second, feeding, sizing, and pretreatment to feed biomass logs at low cost into an enzyme-rich-size-reduction-unit-operation, where the loosely-held-logs are chipped, enzymatically-pretreated and sized at low energy using mild alkali in a disc refiner to reduce particle size and release sugars from cellulose and hemicellulose structures of the biomass. This pretreatment ensures improved access of all biomass components to subsequent microbial fermentation to produce PHA; and third, the hydrolyzed biomass into sugars and deconstructed lignin goes through a novel biosynthesis via endogenous Pseudomonas putida route for PHA production.
Summary/Accomplishments (Outputs/Outcomes):
With a successful completion of a Phase I and II under EPA support, Altex and Texas A&M University (TAMU) has optimized the RBP process for PHA production and scaled up the process by 30X under Phase II. The PHA produced were then characterized for a potential application of bioplastics for commercialization. Finally, technical, and economic evaluations and Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) were performed to determine bioplastics production-and-plant cost, and Green House Gas savings from the RBP process.
The innovative platform of whole biomass conversion as in the RBP process, showed several significant advantages over previous sugar platform and other platforms. First, biomass is readily available as a low cost feedstock. Second, fermentation with sugar substrate alone will lead to high level of acid production. We found that co-fermentation of lignin and sugar actually reduce the acid production and led to better performance, providing that lignin can be well fractionated. Third, the complete biomass utilization improves the carbon conversion efficiency, reduces the waste management, and certain enables better economics and sustainability.
The novel updated pretreatment process ensured ideal feed-size and degradation for optimized-microbial-synthesis, while reducing grinding energy and enhancing biomass reactivity by 20% to achieve maximum bioplastic yield for the microbial synthesis and conversion process. The optimized pretreatment under EPA-Phase II increased the biomass sugar conversion from 50 to 89% for glucose, 66 to 71% for xylose and arabinose, and increased lignin conversion from 12 to 33% to PHA for bioplastics production. Based on the improved RBP process, PHA yield was up to 53%. The final bioplastics yield was 45 to 50% from the complete biomass (corn stover) structure, where the cellulose (32%), hemicellulose (18%), and lignin (25%) contents were converted to bioplastics after the extractives and ashes (25%) were removed.
Based on PHA characterization, size exclusion chromatography (SEC), our different variations in molecular weight of the medium chain length (mcl)-PHA polymer could potentially serve the enormous packaging industry and/or biomedical industry. Economic analysis under the project showed that the production cost of bioplastics is $0.26/lb. with a selling price of $1.1/lb (to be competitive with plastic- $0.9 to $3/lb) with a simple payback is half a year. Altex RBP plant reduces GHG emissions by 0.84 to 152 MM tons/year depending on different biomass. This is a significant effect on our environment. With the bioplastics plant, there would also be more jobs created for the economy.
Conclusions:
For the bioplastics produced from the Altex-RBP process, the targeted final customers are the ones that currently use petroleum-sourced plastic products. The product's low cost and its low carbon foot print will attract these customers. The business model is to license the technology to a plastic or bioplastic manufacturer who has access to these customers and has the manufacturing, marketing, sales and service capabilities that are needed by the customers.
Additionally, due to the significantly high yield and low cost nature of the RBP process for bioplastics production, it allows potential investors to invest in a smaller plant size without sacrificing on the yield and cost of the bioplastics production. This has been shown in the sensitivity study performed under Phase II. With the scale-up and PHA characterization performed under Phase II, Altex has established close relationship with potential commercialization partners. Altex is currently looking for further government and/or commercial support on furthering the scale-up work and implementation of the Altex PHA into specific bioplastics product application.
SBIR Phase I:
Renewable Bioplastics Production | Final ReportThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.