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What is Ingeo?
Back in 1989, NatureWorks had a big, crazy idea. What if they could turn greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into products? NatureWorks got to work, looking to plants for inspiration. It took a lot of hard thinking and some real innovation, but today Ingeo polymers are valued for their unique properties and found in products from coffee capsules to electronics.
Where Ingeo Comes From?
At NatureWorks, they use our best technologies to turn greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, into performance materials. The sustainability of how to convert these greenhouse gases into Ingeo and Vercet products matters, and take a hard look at this in everything they do.
Currently, the first step in transforming greenhouse gases into our products involves using agricultural crops to sequester carbon, "fixing" it as simple plant sugars through the process of photosynthesis. This rightfully brings up questions around feedstock sourcing and sustainable growing practices. UN Construct for Sustainable Agriculture.
Performance materials made by transforming the right, abundant, local resources. They are committed to feedstock diversification–to using the most abundant, locally available, and sustainable source of biobased carbon, wherever they produce. Equally, they are committed to critically assessing and assuring the sustainability of each and every feedstock they use.
NatureWorks are cautious about automatically viewing each next generation of feedstock as inherently more sustainable than the previous one. Whether it's the first generation "bridging feedstock" used today, industrially sourced corn, or whether it's cutting-edge concepts for turning CO2 or CH4 directly into green building blocks – bypassing the agricultural step altogether, at NatureWorks, the experts believe it's vital to assure the integrity of the sustainability of every feedstock we use.
How Ingeo is Made?
Nature looks at greenhouse gases, like atmospheric carbon, as a feedstock, a raw material. It's what trees, plants, and coral reefs, are built from. At NatureWorks, we're doing the same thing – using our best technologies to turn greenhouse gases into a portfolio of polylactic acid (PLA) performance materials called Ingeo.
- The Process Starts with Greenhouse Gases: Nature looks at greenhouse gases, like atmospheric carbon, as a feedstock, a raw material. It's what trees, plants, and coral reefs, are built from. At NatureWorks, the experts are doing the same thing – using the best technologies to turn greenhouse gases into a portfolio of polylactic acid (PLA) performance materials called Ingeo.
- Creating Lactic Acid, the Building Block of Ingeo: The plants are put through a milling process extracting the starch (glucose). Enzymes are added to convert the glucose to dextrose via a process called hydrolysis. Microorganisms then ferment this dextrose into lactic acid.
- Transforming Lactic Acid to Lactide: A proprietary two-step process transforms lactic acid molecules into rings of lactide, which is a valuable chemical on its own and the core of our customizable platform of chemical intermediates.
- Polymerizing Lactide into Ingeo PLA: In the process of polymerization, the lactide ring is opened and linked together to form the long chain of polylactide polymer we call Ingeo. NatureWorks form this long chain of Ingeo PLA into pellets that are shipped around the world to our customers and partners who transform them into a wide-range of innovative products including coffee capsules, yogurt cups, baby wipes, and appliances.
Why it Matters?
If you replace one average PET baby wipe with one made from Ingeo, that saves non-renewable energy equal to running a lightbulb for 10 minutes.
How do NatureWorks know this? Data...and lots of it. NatureWorks have developed and published peer-reviewed eco-profiles and life cycle analysis (LCA) to help us quantify the environmental impact of Ingeo & products made with the polymer. Developing an all new material like Ingeo is a journey. They continually invest in fundamental R&D to improve how they make Ingeo and its eco-profile.
Where it Goes? & Circular Economy
NatureWorks have carefully developed a vision for the disposal & recycling of products made with Ingeo. Yet when thinking about environmental impact and end-of-life options, it's important to embrace the complexity of product lifecycles and variability by both product and region. The experts work with NGO's, governments, and partners on frameworks like the Circular Economy and Sustainable Materials Management to ensure responsible material choices are understood while enabling the right end-of-life scenarios.
- Composting
- Recycling
- Anaerobic Digestion
- Chemical Recycling
- Incineration
- Landfill
ORNL and UMaine Collaboration: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the University of Maine have launched the first large-scale biobased additive manufacturing program in the US. They have collaborated to 3D print a large-scale mold from bioderived materials. The mold is being used to fabricate the top of a yacht and was made from wood flour, cellulose nanofibrils, and Ingeo.
Natureworks Ingeo produkty
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