Biobased PEF Bottle Aimed at Substituting Conventional PET

In 2019, PT reported that the Dutch renewable chemicals company Avantium had acquired 100% of Synvina, its joint venture with BASF and that it had a revised scale-up and market launch strategy for commercializing its YXY branded technology of furanics—a class of chemical building blocks used to produce innovative “green” fuels, chemicals and renewable materials. More specifically, the company has been focussed on the production scale-up of polyethylene furanoate (PEF), a 100% biobased alternative to PET and has been working on attracting investment capital.

 

Avantium has now developed a PEF bottle that is designed to fully degrade within a year in a composter and would require a few years longer under normal outdoor conditions if littered into the environment. Avantium’s CEO Tom van Aken says it would be most ideal for the bottle to be recycled. The brewing company Carlsberg, among the first group of supporting companies, is aiming to offer its beer in a cardboard bottle lined with an inner layer of biobased PEF.

More recently, Coca-Cola and the food company Danone have also come on board. In a first project phase, Avantium plans to produce 10 million lb/yr (5,000 tons/yr) of  PEF using so called first-generation renewable feedstock (e.g., sugar, maize, wheat or beets). In the long term, the plant sugar should also be derived from second-generation feedstock in the form of bio waste. Avantium’s plan is to have the first PEF bottles in stores by 2023.

Production of bioplastics is considered climate-neutral, because, during their growth process, the processed plants remove as much CO₂ from the atmosphere as they emit when decomposing. Also, there is no land-use challenge, as the land used to  grow the renewable feedstock in 2019, amounted to about 1.95-million acres (790,000 hectares), which accounts for less than 2% of the global agricultural are, 97% of which were used for pasture, feed and food. Despite the market growth predicted in the next five years, the land use share for bioplastics will remain around 2%.