Features
The chemicals companies decarbonising with bio-feedstocks
Accenture and NexantECA, an energy and chemicals advisory company, estimate that the chemicals industry needs to cut annual GHG emissions by 186 million tons in total over the next thirty years to reach net zero by 2050. While most chemical…
An oil shock may be imminent. Has the bioeconomy’s time come?
The first plant-based plastics entered the market in the eighties. Four decades on and only one percent of the world’s annual plastic output is made from biological sources. Despite mounting pressure on corporations to decarbonise, high market prices are still…
The detergents industry rediscovers the cleansing power of plants
Detergents are a section of the chemical industry where bio-substitutes for petrochemicals are being adopted at a rapid rate. Europe is the largest market for renewable detergents and 50 percent of the estimated 3 million tons of surfactants made there…
Startup’s no-kill cellular fur could be a fashion gamechanger
Fur has proven to be among the most difficult textiles to imitate synthetically. Now, Dutch company Geneus Biotech has grown the real thing. Under the brand name FUROIDTM, it has produced a 2cm by 2 cm swatch prototype of the…
Printed organs and the search for the perfect bioink
It was in the late eighties that scientists first envisaged a merger between 3D printing and tissue engineering. At their intersection lay the possibility of machine-manufactured organs and tissue. Bioprinting technology remained a distant prospect until the 2010s, when researchers…
How seaweed agtech can ease the fertiliser crisis
In 2010, California-based KZO Sea Farms received a permit for developing an offshore mariculture facility in US federal waters. Recently, the company was inspired by an Indonesian pilot study to develop a path-breaking offshore cultivation technique for seaweed. Its innovation…