Award for startup with a solution for plastic pest
A promising new material, set to transform certain types of manufacturing and prevent tonnes of plastic pollution harming the seas, has been developed in Bath.
The Bath University startup, Naturbeads, was the winner of the prestigious Environmental and Sustainability Award at the Bath Live Business Awards due to the potential importance of its innovation for conservation.
However, while the technology could also be significant for Bath’s economy and the country’s exports, manufacturing might move abroad due to Britain leaving the EU.
Naturbeads, based in the university’s chemical engineering department, has developed a product that will replace the small plastic beads that are used to make cosmetics, paints and adhesives in manufacturing processes across the world.
Its material, a form of cellulose like the cell walls of plants or animals, is not as flexible for manufacturing as starch, which can be adapted to make films and carrier bags similar to plastic bags, but is far stronger.
Both starch and cellulose are made from polysaccharides – chains of sugar molecules – so they are fully biodegradable, but cellulose cannot be melted, moulded or stretched into a film. Instead, the team have devised techniques to form it into spherical shapes, pioneering a process called membrane emulsification, which they have used for the first time.
Chief executive Giovanna Laudisio described Naturbeads as a ‘cleantech’ startup, adding: “We want to produce cellulose microspheres in a sustainable and costefficient way. Our cellulose microspheres have been successfully tested in cosmetics, paints, adhesive, leather products and other consumer and industrial applications to replace polluting plastic microspheres.
“The recognition that comes from winning an award like the Bath Live Business Award is really helpful to increase our visibility and reach more companies looking for a solution to reduce their environmental impact and become more sustainable. Our next step is to find the right industrial partners and investors to help us accelerate our path to commercialisation and deliver on our mission to prevent hundreds of thousands of tons of microplastics from being released into the environment.”
The company is now commercialising the process to form microspheres – also called microbeads.
Naturbeads has the potential to be a major commercial success in the city. However, a source revealed that since the main suppliers and customers for the technology were in the EU, it would make more sense to manufacture the beads in a country that had no borders or tariff barriers with Europe.
Ms Laudisio was enthusiastic about plans to build a trial manufacturing capability before scaling up to industrial quantities.
“Initially we only want to make 20 tonnes per year,” she said, “which is nothing at all compared with the production volumes of plastic beads we want to substitute.”