Genomatica and the new road to bioeconomy innovation

August 29, 2018 |

We’re going to look in on Genomatica today and a shift in innovation which is important to all and particularly to the fans of ventures that find commercial success as well as commercial-scale, but we’ll not begin in San Diego or the usual ventureburghs of Silicon Valley or Boston. Instead, we’ll commence in the country where Genomatica process technology is on view, at scale — that’s Italy.

Italy is a hotbed of sustainable enterprise. Bio-On is focused on an organic acids play. And Novamont is here with a splendid biorefinery that makes biobased BDO (1.4. butanediol) as a sustainable ingredient in modern plastics that have renewable attributes, based on Genomatica technology. 

With a 30,000 ton biorefinery that uses sugars as a feedstock rather than finite supplies of natural gas or oil, Novamont is able to increase the renewable content of its advanced plastics (and the materials made from them) from 30% renewable to 65% renewable content. That’s real progress in sustainability, because carbon that is properly diverted to plastics (and away from single-use applications that have rightly fallen out of favor) is carbon sequestered for the long-haul.

And Eni is making renewable diesel at the first oil refinery ever converted over entirely to renewable fuels. And whomever purchases the Beta Renewables technology in that sale process will inherit the world’s first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol refinery, in Crescentino.

But the south of Italy is a testament to sustainability on a grander scale, having evolved and persevered through era of Roman, Ostrogoth, Byzantine, Norman, Spanish, French and now Italian control, and includes an era of powerful independence as the Duchy of Amalfi and Kingdom of Naples.

On the southern Italian coast, there’s no waste of space or much waste of anything.

First there was farming, then fishing, and trade, small manufacturing evolved and now this coastline flourishes as a tourist enclave for sun-worshipping Europeans and Americans on European adventure.  Private houses, rooming houses of an earlier age, fortress towers, stables and even a couple of convents and monasteries have been converted over to the housing for tourists, boutique shops and restaurants that the modern European requires on holiday. 

On this coast, nothing is wasted, not a single scrap of road goes untrammeled day and night by tourist busses straining to fit themselves on slightly widened goat tracks carved into great stone cliffs, and the houses are stacked upon each other and fastened to the cliffsides like medieval skyscrapers done in brightly painted colors.

Bisogna accomodarsi ai tempi. goes an old Italian saying, which roughly translates to “we must accommodate ourselves to the times we live in”. And though accommodations are what most people think of when they think of the Costa Amalfi, think instead of accommodation, of adaptation to changing times.

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