The Ellen MacArthur Foundation announced the winners of its $1 million Circular Materials Challenge at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The winners will join a 12-month accelerator programme working with experts to make their innovations marketable at scale. Among the winners are a number of innovative biopolymers and applications for bioplastics, including EUBP [...]
Companies in the food sector are increasingly looking for alternatives to conventional plastic packaging to reduce their CO2 footprint and are switching to packaging solutions made from renewable raw materials. A team at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands is studying the perceptions of bio-based packaging among consumers and aims to give manufacturers [...]
Non-biodegradable cotton buds prohibited in Italy from 2019: Italy will be the first country to ban non-biodegradable plastic cotton buds as of 2019. The Italian parliament adopted a proposal on 19 December 2017 to only allow the production and sale of cotton buds that are biodegradable and compostable according to the European standard EN [...]
Mazda teams with Mitsubishi Chemical to develop bio-based engineering plastic grade: Mitsubishi Chemical Corp. and Mazda have jointly developed a new grade of Durabio, a bio-derived polycarbonate engineering plastic suitable for molding large cosmetic automotive parts. Durabio is based partially on isosorbide, which in turn is derived from sorbitol, a widely available natural feedstock. [...]
The new German packaging law (Verpackungsgesetz, effective from January 2019, we reported earlier this year) includes provisions under which the participation fees for packaging shall be adapted in order to incentivise the use of recycled and renewable materials. The consequential increase in bio-based plastic packaging and the expected rise of new types of materials [...]
Berlin, 29 November 2017 – The results of European Bioplastics’ annual market data update, presented today at the 12th European Bioplastics Conference in Berlin, confirm a stable growth of the global bioplastics industry. “The global market for bioplastics is predicted to grow by 20 percent over the next five years. The transition to a [...]
Every year, the European Bioplastics Conference features a well-rounded conference programme attracting senior executives from across the bioplastics value chain, policy bodies, NGOs, and brand owners. We are happy to announce the final speaker line-up of this year’s conference, taking place on 28-29 November 2017 in Berlin, Germany. François de Bie, Chairman of [...]
Test bottles made from PET © Synvina PEFerence, a €25 million EU project, was officially launched at the end of September 2017. The partners will be cooperating for the next five years to establish an innovative value chain for FDCA (2,5-Furandicarboxylic acid) and PEF (Polyethylene furanoate), including the intended construction of a 50,000 tons [...]
IKEA’s first large-scale bioplastic product: The popular re-sealable sandwich bag ISTAD is the first large-scale bioplastic product from IKEA. The bags are made from bio-based plastics derived from sugarcane where everything is either used or reused, so there is no waste in the production. IKEA estimates to sell 1.4 billion ISTAD bags this year, which [...]
Berlin, 17 October 2017 – Biodegradable plastics offer innovative solutions to improve recycling quality by facilitating the means for more efficient separate waste collection. This has been confirmed by a recent study jointly released by Corepla, the Italian Consortium for Collecting, Recycling, and Recovering Plastic Packaging, the Italian Composters Consortium (CIC), and Assobioplastiche, the [...]