The PHA producer commercialized multiple new offerings in recent years, invested in a new Massachusetts polymer science facility and regularly works with composters to tests its products.
A type of bioplastic that’s been decades in the making in Massachusetts is starting to scale, thanks in part to investments from a South Korean food company.
CJ Biomaterials, part of the global CJ Group, has ramped up investment in its proprietary blend of polyhydroxyalkanoates, known as PHACT, with an eye to the packaging market. The company’s evolution illustrates how complex it is in bioplastics to prove commercial viability, get to market, convince composters to accept products and then scale adoption among packaging companies and their customers.
The product traces it roots back to a startup called Metabolix, founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology students in the early ’90s, which used fermentation and bioengineering to create a product that could replace conventional plastic. While Metabolix made a lot of headway, including commercialization of the technology in the early 2000s, the company didn’t reach full viability and sold its technology to CJ Cheiljedang for $10 million in 2016.
“Looking back on it, the technology was 15 years too early, but it really grew from a lab project to a commercialized product,” said Max Senechal, chief commercial officer at CJ Biomaterials and a former employee of Metabolix, during a recent facility tour. “CJ was already a very well-established biotechnology player — not in PHA, in other industrial products — but they were able to take all that experience and really bring that into the PHA platform and bring it to the next level.”
This helped evolve the strain engineering and fermentation technology itself, and bridge the cost delta with petroleum-based plastics.
“There were things at Metabolix that we thought were established science, theoretical yields, theoretical performance that would not be exceeded based on what we knew the science was at that time. ... Fast forward to today: We’ve blown through some of these things,” he said. “We’re no longer four or five times more expensive. We’re getting much closer.”
Bioplastics pivot
CJ didn’t initially put a major emphasis on its acquired PHA technology but has recently evolved its approach.