Waste is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Poly-Green Technologies Develop PUR Foam Production from Biodiesel Waste

A researcher from Ohio State University has developed a way to produce polyurethane foam from a byproduct of biodiesel manufacture which is usually just discarded, neatly finding a greener way to produce PUR and making the biodiesel game more profitable.

Crude glycerin is the biodiesel byproduct; it is usually of so little value that it is usually thrown away. However, researcher Yebo Li found a way to convert it into a polyol which can then in turn be used to produce polyurethane (PUR). PUR is commonly used in the form of foams in the automotive industry to produce gaskets, seals, tires and also in interior upholstery. It also has application in adhesives, coatings and can be used as a hard plastic. The final PUR product is comparable to the petrochemically derived product in quality.

The fact that the process uses a waste product as feedstock makes it cheap; the polyol can be produced 5-10% more cheaply than petroleum based polyols. This is still true in comparison to other processes used to manufacture polyols from biomass because what is otherwise a waste product is cheaper than biomass. The quality of the product made from waste is also higher than the quality of the product produced from biomass; these biopolyols must be blended with petrochemically derived polyols to bring the quality up to scratch for some applications. As Jeff Schultheis, Chief Operating Officer of Poly-Green Technologies puts it, the company is “competing not just on being 'green,' but also on overall quality and cost." Crude glycerin is currently cheap and abundant and as biodiesel production grows, more of glycerin will be produced; for every ten gallons of biodiesel produced, a gallon of crude glycerin is produced. In 2011, it is predicted that 70 million gallons of crude glycerin will be produced in the US.

With biodiesel production rising, there is a need for this technology and others like it which put waste to use. Biodiesel has been struggling this past year with a subsidy that was not renewed, and a technology such as this would give biodiesel producers another way to add value to their operations at this rough time. Also, this value would be from activity in the chemicals industry; several presenters (such as Genomatica) at the Infocast event in Milan claim that the chemicals industry is a more stable market than fuels. The additional stable revenue stream would give the biodiesel industry a safety net as it grows, something that would mean that feedstock is used more efficiently.

Poly-green technologies is in a late stage of development and looking at moving quickly to scale up and is constructing a reactor which will allow the company to produce hundreds of thousands of gallons of polyols a year and they believe that they can increase the output to more than that. The company has also got the help of a marketing company with experience in the polyol industry. The PUR industry in the US is worth more than $13bn and is very reliant on petroleum. When this technology comes to market, Poly-Green Technologies predict that they will be able to sell 1 million gallons in the first year and increase to 5 million gallons within 5 years.  

However, the green credentials of PUR are not great. PUR is produced by polymerizing polyols and isocyanates; even if polyols can be produced renewably from waste, isocyanates are a problem. There are ways to synthesize them from soy bean oil; however there are no projects working to commercialize them at present. Isocyanates are also fairly toxic, being known to sensitize handlers to asthma attacks. Interestingly, a company called Nanotech Industries has developed a variant of PUR that does not use any isocyanates, maybe a match between these two companies could deliver the greenest PUR the world has seen?