Humanity has always relied on Nature for survival, but today we take oil as a feedstock and use it to produce chemicals to suit any purpose, from fuels and medicines to plastics. By reducing our reliance on Nature, we have forgotten our respect of Nature in the process. The world is now covered in oil in the form of non-biodegradable synthetic plastics which mar our landscapes and threaten our oceans. By 2050 there is predicted to be more plastic in the ocean than fish. At the same time, plastics represent a $654 billion market worldwide and are ubiquitous in modern life. Simply eliminating synthetic plastic use with no viable alternatives would be almost impossible and catastrophic from both a social and economic point of view.

Chemists make new chemicals and that has led to the development of a chemical industry that knows how to sell these chemicals. The more chemicals we make, the more the industry seeks new and better markets to sell them into. New, more sustainable technologies have been forced into the business of ‘replacements’ and must follow the same commercialization pathways as the old technologies they are trying to replace. The unsustainable practices, however, have often had decades or more head start and thus the economics to replace them are often insurmountable without government or policy intervention. The technologies to directly replace synthetic plastics with renewable biopolymers from plants and animals are there, but the consistencies of supply and economies of scale to make them competitive are not.

With a plethora of abundant natural and renewable resources (in terms of both quantity and diversity), from water purification - to cosmetics - to medical applications, the quality of human life can greatly benefit (and improve at the same time) from new, innovative technologies using building blocks obtained directly from plants and animals. With this mission in mind, we are exploring the entire range of the “biorefinery concept,” from dissolution, and conversion of plant and animal resources into value added chemicals and extraction of essential oils or vital chemicals, to isolation of pure biopolymers and production of new biomaterials from them. Because we can directly dissolve Nature’s raw materials, we can shape them, functionalize them, blend them, and use other non-chemistry means to produce advanced functional materials. These new, innovative materials represent new market opportunities which we will develop and promote.