Brightplus is on a mission to reduce the circularity gap with its proprietary BrightBio® technology, but what exactly is BrightBio®? Technology Director Jarkko Leivo, Dr.Tech., now explains the revolutionary technology behind our visionary innovation.
Let’s start from scratch. 92 billion tonnes of Earth’s virgin resources are extracted every year, meaning mineral excavation, land cultivation, biomass incineration with CO2 emissions, and number of other ways we consume our planets valuable biobased stocks. It is a shocking fact that, despite our awakened era of circular economy with numerous sustainability initiatives, half of the extraction is returned virtually unutilised back into nature. This mismatch is called a circularity gap, which explains extremely well how only 10% of modern consumer products are factually recycled in the loop, whereas majority of the valuable bioresources are already dispersed back and wasted in the early stages of production.
BrightBio® is a frontrunner technology created to reduce this circularity gap. We upcycle various of the unutilised industrial by-products, side streams, such as husk, straw, vegetable oils, lignin, essential silicate minerals, and many other natural compounds, that industrial processes reject massive amounts every day, as a base of our technology.
On top of that, we have built our visionary BrightBio® technology on the principles of green chemistry: the right choice of catalyst, reaction components, and reaction pathways all ensure greener manufacturing steps towards sustainable materials that our growing economies consume in increasing amounts in next decades. Furthermore, we have replaced common organic fossil-based synthesis solvents with green solvents, high-solids or fully water-based solutions to guarantee the ultimate sustainable and renewable carbon framework.
At the heart of BrightBio® technology is the chemical modification of biobased material components, prior to final formulation. Chemical functionalisation enables better compatibility of each side stream component, their tuned reactivity, and variety of material properties. Chemical modifications are applied on a molecular level, forming organic or inorganic monomer or polymer units, and new oligomers are synthesised for highly detailed control of material properties in final products. For instance, the careful choice of the functional units in the polymer yields excellent oxygen and water barrier properties with biodegradability.
As our core is in combining scientific chemistry and hands-on materials creation and processing technology, our boundaries are, therefore, set wide on applications. BrightBio® is applicable with solid plastic-like melt-processable materials and liquid chemicals and coatings such as resins, paints, and lacquers suitable for various spray and other liquid-processing methods. Typical fields of application for BrightBio®® are in consumer packaging, agriculture, and food production, for example, to replace fossil-based plastics.
To put it in a nutshell—think of BrightBio® as the foundational chemical building block from which we can innovate new sustainable materials, or tune the sustainability and performance properties of existing materials, towards a variety of process specifications. Bio and side stream based BrightBio® materials are truly sustainable, have superior technical performance, and are ready for use all over the world, with the ability to be derived from local sources.
About Brightplus
Brightplus Oy is a leading biosourced materials company, based in Finland. Headquarters are in the city of Tampere, with Production and Design Studios in Oulu. The company manufactures, sells, and licenses its BrightBio® material to leading global manufacturers of packaging products for major brands. We work closely with customers from an early stage, to ensure that solutions are practical from the outset and fully comply with their existing processing methods, without the need for capital expenditure.
Further information
info@brightplus.com