Bioplastics

Bioplastics (Biopolymers) include two main categories of polymers: Biobased, Biodegradable, or both.  In the figure below a typical classification of BIOPLASTICs is shown:

Advantages of Bioplastics:

•Reduced Carbon Footprint

•Increased Resource Efficiency

Every class of the bioplastics has their own set of properties and challaneges to be used in regular applications.

•   Biobased durable bioplastics such as PE or PET not only have the same properties as their fossil-fuel based counterparts, but also have additional benefit of reducing the carbon footprint. The major hassle there would be the price difference with their fossil-fuel-based counterparts.

•    Plastics such as PLA and PHAs, though showing unique properties, the manufacturers are not familiar with their processing properties. This makes them reluctant to use integrate this class of materials in their product compositions.

Bioplastics are predicted to grow from around 4.16 million tonnes in 2016 to approximately 6.11 million tonnes by 2021

 (Europeen Bioplastics, Nova institute, 2016)

This number shows the growing importance of bioplastics in the future of Plastics industry and the undeniable necessity of thinking ahead of the game for innovative companies. Plastics products manufacturers should starti working with this class of materials and find the ways to integrate BIOPLASTICS in their product line formulations.

AxiPolymer, with a unique experience on working with bioplastics, has all the capacity to help manufacturers take this big step.