2022 was the year of vegan and renewable textiles – the biobased segment that received among the highest financing rounds of the year. This year, things have shifted somewhat, with a swing back to packaging and bioplastics.
These new materials are not repackaged versions of older bioplastics, however. The venture capital world has been embracing a new generation of substitutes that aims to address the environmental problems posed by earlier biobased plastics.
Bio Market Insights reviews some of the most timely and intriguing new sustainable materials that attracted financing in 2023.
Self-destructive plastics
First up is one of the most interesting, and biggest, financing rounds in sustainable materials this year for an innovation that is neither biobased nor circular. Instead, it is a chemical technology that ‘instructs’ ordinary single-use plastics to break down safely once it enters the natural environment.
The startup responsible for this unusual material innovation is Polymateria, which secured £20 million in Series B funding in May. ABC Impact and Indorama Ventures led the funding round. The company is a spinoff from Imperial College London – an institution has already turned out an impressive list of bioeconomy and sustainable biotech startups over the last several years. Using the funds, the company aims to globally commercialise
Polymateria inserts their proprietary ‘decomposition’ trigger into olefins, one of the most commonly littered types of plastics. If any olefin product containing Polymateria’s chemical innovation escape recycling streams and end up out in the environment – still the most likely fate for a single-use plastics – the chemical trigger activates, transforming the once-functional material into ‘bio-wax’ – an ecologically benign sludge that will eventually dissolve away.
Although the decomposition chemical will remain dormant while the material is in use – ‘to give recycling ‘every chance to happen’, according to the company – natural conditions such as the presence of UV light, air, moisture, microbes ‘alert’ the special compound that it is time to kick into action.
Biotech for cheaper fermented protein
Multus is another interesting bioeconomy startup that received $9.5 million this year for their work on an obscure yet vital part of the food tech biomanufacturing toolkit: microbial growth media.
Alternative meat can give us protein without the immense land use and habitat destruction associated with industrial livestock farming. The most promising pathway to high-volume, low-cost vegan proteins is microbial fermentation – getting custom-modified, rapidly reproducing microbes to digest – in other words, ferment – a starter of raw materials into complex and healthy proteins for human consumption.
These raw materials may be plant based, which microbes can metabolise into new and interesting forms, but they can also be a biopsied sample of livestock flesh. In the latter case, the microbes clone and replicate, offering a way of making real meat without slaughtering any animals. Multus’ products are directly targeted at the cultivated real meat sector, which is the most advanced but least-scaled type of vegan protein.
Production costs for large scale meat cultivation are one of the main barriers to scaling right now. Most of the cost is down to a single input – the cultivation media or substrate, which is whatever substance that the producer gives their protein-yielding microbes to live and feed on. To get substantial yields, the microbes must replicate quickly and this demands high volumes of this input.
Multus offers growth media for the cellular agriculture industry – their products include Proliferum M, specifically designed for fermenters that need microbes to rapidly clone a starter sample of real mammal meat.
In December 2023, Multus announced a collaboration with AI company New Wave Biotech to take their formulations further. New Wave offers software that helps develop synthetic biology products that can scale without the costly effort of real lab experimentation. Virtual experiments on the software cuts the costs and recommends product improvements.
Bio-circular plastics scales with traceless
Most bioplastics on the market are either non-recyclable or require specialised composting facilities to fully and safely decompose. In many instances, these renewables-based materials are actually on par with petrochemical plastics for emissions and biodiversity damage.
One of the biggest bioeconomy funding rounds of this year went to a startup looking to buck the trend by scaling a biobased but also circular material. Germany’s traceless secured €36.6 million to build its first industrial plant for a fully biobased material that is compostable at home, claiming a 91% carbon emissions saving on normal plastic. The funding was led by private equity fund UB Forest Industry Green Growth Fund which focuses on forest and biobased industries, supported by CP’s Blue Ocean Fund.
What’s more, the feedstock for the material does not come from land and emissions intensive crops that could otherwise go towards human food. It comes from waste byproducts of the agricultural industry, one of the most sustainable raw materials around since it takes up no additional energy or materials to make it.
Traceless’ marketing literature hammers home the message that their innovation is not like older bioplastics. In fact, the company does not call their bioplastics at all, aware of the greenwashing connotations associated with these terms. They say their material escapes the sustainability problems that plague the majority of biobased materials on the market and goes ‘beyond plastic and bioplastics’.
One of the key sustainability claims the company makes is that the materials they produce are indistinguishable from certain natural polymers, meaning that microorganisms found anywhere (not just selected strains for specialised bioplastics composting plants) can break them down easily within 2 to 9 weeks. This overcomes a huge environmental drawback of some of the more scaled bioplastics whose chemical structures are basically the same as conventional fossil-based plastics and pose the same challenges to building out a more circular manufacturing economy.
What’s more, the basic technology here is versatile – another problem with many of the bioplastics options available today. Some bioplastics are highly limited in their functionality and hold material properties to serve a single target application. By contrast, traceless’ products can be shaped to the customers choosing as well as refined into multiple forms – adhesives, films, and rigid moulded parts. With 43% of the bioplastics market still going into packaging, this will be the segment that traceless is likely to target.
Investors are now becoming keen to a consumer backlash against an older generation of bioplastics that puts immense pressure on land and other resources to supply renewable raw materials. Traceless’ success this year attests to how bioplastics made from waste byproducts of agriculture, households, or industries are becoming much more visible in the startup scene.
Algae oils decarbonise the outdoor sector
Investor interest in algae as a new generation sustainable feedstock continues with Checkerspot, a US biotech firm that develops biobased products drawn from microalgae, bagging $55 million in Series C funding.
The use of microalgae as feedstock in manufacturing sustainable materials has been growing because it has the potential to address some of the drawbacks of first and second generation bioplastics, most notably the land area pressures that comes with industrial crop cultivation. Microalgae can be grown year-round in bulk and across a much less extensive land area than any land crop and requires far fewer inputs.
Unlike the majority of bioplastics startups, Checkerspot is eyeing not the packaging industry but the outdoor recreational segment which the company captures using the label ‘performance-wear’. Ironically for a market segment that connects consumers to the great outdoors, outdoor gear is one of the hardest consumer industries to decarbonise owing to the many useful properties afforded by petrochemical materials including water resistance, strength and lightness.
Checkerspot’s manufacturing process starts with modifying microalgae strains until they are optimised to produce as much of the target oil substance as possible in the shortest amount of time. The chemicals that the microalgae form are ‘molecular building blocks’ which can be extracted from their bodies and fashioned into novel outdoor materials.
In its initial stages, the company is starting out with developing microalgae-produced triglyceride oils, a base for triglyceride polymers that the company is turning into petrochemical-free composite skis. In addition, the company has created 100% biobased textile finishes that remove the need for the highly synthetic and environmentally toxic coatings that are almost universal in the outdoor gear space.
Bioplastics class of ‘23
In today’s biomarket, bioplastics cannot just compete with dirty petrochemicals. They must also prove their sustainability credentials against the far less environmentally conscientious bio-based plastics that have dominated the market so far.
The bioplastics attracting funding today confront some of the environmentally dubious properties of early-generation biomaterials, notorious for using cultivated crop feedstocks that compete with land for food production and conservation.
These older materials may be made from plants but are nonetheless hard to recycle, usually non-compostable, and as a consequence are just as prone to sitting in landfills as the petrochemicals they aim to replace.
Startups have been honing alternative feedstocks and processes for years to cut back on the environmental impacts of ‘green’ materials. Now, their results are just starting to inch their way out into the consumer market, developing more rigorously sustainable products that can either be processed and re-used at the end of their life or composted without leaving toxic chemicals in the environment. The pattern of bioeconomy funding through 2023 shows evidence that the pushback against problematic bioplastics are leading investors to finally define sustainability beyond the narrow sense of renewable feedstocks.
