Chemical Valley Positions Itself as the Home of the Country’s Emerging Bioeconomy

by Tim Lougheed (Chemical Institute of Canada) ... Over the past decade, however, this neighbourhood has been evolving in response to emerging environmental and social priorities that promise to alter supply chains that have traditionally been dominated by petroleum. The scene now includes a new generation of chemical processors who are taking advantage of the region’s other longstanding resource — a rich agricultural landscape.

“You are in a distinct position here in Canada to take a leadership role in the development of bio-based materials and the circular economy,” said Deborah Mielewski, a senior researcher at the Ford Motor Company’s Research and Innovation Center. She was in Sarnia this September to speak at the Canadian BioDesign Conference, an annual event that offers an overview of how this new channel is making its way into global chemical networks.

Her own workplace in Dearborn, MI, is among those conduits, as she and her colleagues explore the prospects of establishing vehicle material supply lines based on farm field residue, food processing by-products, and even more unlikely items such as cast off cotton found in blue jeans and worn out banknotes. At first glance, she explained, the large laboratory looks more like a barn containing piles of various materials that look like they just fell off a tractor wagon — wheat straw, coconut husks, wood chips, beans, sugar cane, and dandelions.

Not everything on a car can be made from such biologically-based inputs, acknowledged Mielewski; but with an average of 40,000 parts incorporating no fewer than 10,000 chemical substances, she saw a lot of room for innovation that could make a significant portion of a vehicle lighter and easier to recycle.

Among the organizations working with BIC (Bioindustrial Innovation Canada) on BioDesign has been the Forest Products Association of Canada, the research network FP Innovations, and BioNB, an agency responsible for bioscience development in New Brunswick. Meaghan Seagrave, Executive Director of BioNB, recounted how BioNB and BIC, along with some 30 companies and 15 academic institutions, mounted a proposal last year in response to the federal government’s effort to establish a series of nation-wide superclusters, research and development powerhouses in strategic areas of the Canadian and global economies.

Murray McLaughlin, the former Executive Director of BIC and The Sustainable Chemistry Alliance, suggested that this approach was necessary in light of the glaring absence of any federal initiative to develop the country’s bioeconomy. He added that the importance of that economy was underscored by a series of 2017 reports from the federal Advisory Council on Economic Growth, which highlighted agriculture as a key to the country’s future economic growth.

“If we really want agriculture to meet that demand and that growth that’s being projected, the bioeconomy has to be a key part of that,” said McLaughlin. “It’s not just a matter of producing more grains and oil seeds and shipping them out of the country, but producing something of value.”

Stephen Galowitz related his own encounters with such problems as a founding member of the NaturALL Alliance, a multinational collaboration to incorporate organic inputs into the vast global output of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles that have become the ubiquitous containers for water and soft drinks.

He noted how the chemistry, which turns wood or agriculture residue into para-xylene for conversion into PET, is straightforward; however, convincing bottle manufacturers to use a bio-based version of this agent is anything but. He and his colleagues therefore focused instead on convincing the end users — giant bottled-water distributors such as Nestle, Danone and PepsiCo — of the virtues associated with such materials.

“When we went to the downstream converters and told them all about our great stuff, they really didn’t care,” he recalled. “It was very hard to get them to return our calls and to get them to enter into agreements to convert our products and spend money to do pilot testing. But when the end-users call — who spend hundreds of millions of dollars on these converters every year — they sat up and looked.” READ MORE