Higher Performance, Carbon Negative Plastics, Maybe for Less: The Digest’s 2021 Multi-Slide Guide to ReSource Chemical

By slide three, we are introduced to PEF, which readers familiar with the Avantium story and to some extent the DuPont FDCA story will have some background. PEF is a clear plastic, biobased as you see here, with notes that it is recyclable (well, so is fossil plastic), yet also compostable and biodegradable. We will usually interject with the Due Diligence Wolfpack question at this point, biodegrades into what, exactly? If it degrades to methane, you’d rather have it carbon-stored as a plastic. After all, there is carbon in there, and people have been wondering around injecting carbon into oil wells and caves, hoping that it will stay there for 50-100 years or more. That’s carbon storage, in a nutshell. To some extent, so’s old plastic, a form of carbon storage, that is. Just to make the point that biodegrading is not a total no-brainer win.

But there’s something nice about PEF, that’s not mentioned here. Not only does it form a great see-through barrier, it works very well with small-scale liquids. Ever notice that there are lots of 16 ounce plastic bottles, but no 4 ounce ones? That’s because the clear plastic bottle incumbent, PET, doesn’t perform so well at small scale. PEF does.