Okay, Metabolics is a bioscience company
and we’re focused on clean solutions for plastics, chemicals, and energy.
Our first product that we’re commercializing this year is a biodegradable biobased plastic.
The kind of things that our technology has aimed to solve
include energy security, litter, and global warming, CO2,
and I’ll get into the problem first and then the solution.
Show of hands, how many people in the room subscribed to the pick oil theory
and that we should plan for a world without oil?
Almost everyone, very good.
What about plastics? Almost all plastics today are made from oil.
You don’t have oil, try living a day without plastic, what are you gonna do?
Okay, 540 billion pounds a year of plastic made. The vast majority ends up in landfills.
The biggest dumping ground, the ocean.
There’s an island of plastic on the Pacific Ocean about the size of Texas.
Our plastic naturally biodegrades in the ocean.
Of the 540 billion pounds of plastic made,
each pound generates between two and four pounds of CO2
during the production process from petroleum.
Our first technology is greenhouse gas neutral
and we’re gonna drive that to be greenhouse gas negative going forward.
Metabolics is a leader in the world of industrial biotechnology.
And what that means is we take a variety of renewable resources
into a series of processes including genetic modification, fermentation.
We can deal with the industries of plastics, chemicals, and fuels in a variety of ways
and our technology allows us to access each of these markets.
Moving to what we do,
here’s our plant that’s being constructed with our joint venture partner
Archer Daniels Midland in Clinton, Iowa,
and we will be commercializing this family of products this year
and it’s starting up as we speak right now.
So this technology is live and it’s meaningful.
Now, as much it’s biodegradable, this is a picture of a credit card type piece of plastic.
Within 90 days it will naturally biodegrade anywhere microbes are present.
A bag, plastic bag, biodegraded in 20 days in a lake in Wisconsin.
We can tailor the rate of biodegradability based on the application.
It allows us access to huge markets. We have 3,000 potential customers.
We’re looking at both the conventional applications like printers and cosmetic cases,
but very innovative cases. Ag Film that biodegrades in the field.
Shoreline restoration where the plastic can hold plants in place
and naturally biodegrade as a shoreline recovers.
It also offers a whole series of options for plastic’s end of life.
Right now, landfill is the predominant, little bit of recycling.
But with a material like ours, we can accelerate composting, anaerobic digestion
for the production of biogas,
and even better, a product that’s biodegradable by design
like the ag mult...film example.
The same core technology allows us to access chemicals.
We can deal with biobased chemicals
and produce biobased chemicals we’re working towards that
go into solvents, coatings, paints, and a number of things
all built off our same technology... platform,
and this is next in our sights in term of what we’re commercializing.
Our third platform really illustrates how fast this technology is moving.
We can express the same plastic directly in the gliff tissue of crops.
We’ve already expressed near four percent in switchgrass
and near four percent in sugarcane.
What this means is a negative carbon footprint in extremely low cost to production
that allows us to compete with petroleum plastics at very low oil prices.
It also enables the creation of the vision for many of us, the biorefinery.
We’re at one refinery. We can make fuels, chemicals, and plastics
in a very environmentally advantageous way.
It’s been a very long road for Metabolics. This technology was found in 1992.
A lot of bumps along the way, a lot of things we’ve had to overcome,
but we’re positioned wonderfully now.
We have a great joint venture partner, Archer Daniels Midland,
and we actually can see huge opportunity.
The issue for us is how do we actually get this to market more quickly?
Now, the way I see that happening
is the integration between consumer and societal demand for this type of product.
The industry both with the established infrastructure
and what we’re doing as entrepreneurs and government policy.
And I think each of these are moving forward
but I don’t believe they’re moving fast enough
and we have to try to integrate them in an effective way.
So just to conclude, you know, this technology is here
that can address all of these major issues. We’re doing it now.
And it can make a huge difference for us as we look towards the future
as it relates to energy security, as it relates to CO2, and as it relates to litter.
Thanks.