Purac and Selzer Develop New Polymerization Technology for PLA

The first plant to use this new technology will be built by Synbra in the Netherlands for the production of BIOFOAM, a foamed product made from this PLA, complementary to their wide range of polystyrene foam products offered today.

08/09/08 CSM nv subsidiary PURAC and Sulzer Chemtech have jointly developed a new cost effective polymerization process to produce high quality Poly-Lactic Acid (PLA). The new process relies upon proprietary and jointly developed polymerization and devolatilization technology to efficiently produce a range of PLA products from the specialty Lactides supplied by PURAC. PURAC and Sulzer Chemtec signed a joint cooperation agreement for the development and sharing of this technology.

Poly-Lactic Acid is a bioplastic made from biorenewable raw materials like carbo-hydrates. PURAC offers the lactide monomers as polymerization feedstock and in cooperation with Sulzer the polymerization technology to make PLA.

This offering will significantly reduce the process and product development time thereby enabling faster and more reliable market entry for PLA producers. The new process requires substantially less investment and has unmatched potential for economic scale-up to high volumes.

The first plant to use this new technology will be built by Synbra in the Netherlands for the production of BIOFOAM, a foamed product made from this PLA, complementary to their wide range of polystyrene foam products offered today. The new plant with a capacity of 5,000 ton/year is targeted to be operational by the end of 2009. Synbra intends to assume a leading position in Europe as supplier of biologically degradable polymers from renewable sources and plans to expand the PLA capacity to 50,000 ton/year.

By the end of 2008, a demonstration and product development plant will be available exclusively to partners of PURAC, to facilitate both product and process development to meet various application and customer demands. The demonstration plant will be located at Sulzer Chemtec in Winterthur, Switzerland.

PURAC owns state-of-the-art lactic acid plants located in areas with favorable carbohydrate feedstock. The latest addition has been a 100,000 ton plant in Thailand that became operational November 2007.