Bioplastic from soy molasses
Four Finnish companies — Finnfoam Oy (Salo; www.finnfoam.com), Brightplus Oy (Tampere, Suomi; www.brightplus.com), VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland (Espoo; www.vttresearch.com) and Nordic Soya Oy (Uusikaupunki; www.nordicsoya.com) — have developed a process to produce compostable bioplastic from food-and-feed production side streams. The process was developed in the course of a four-year research project that was partly funded by Business Finland. A biopolymer plant will be built in Uusikaupunki, Finland, in which bioplastic production will be piloted on an industrial scale. The new plant is to be operating by the end of 2023.
The four partners have jointly explored the possibilities of using soy molasses — a side stream of soy processing — as a raw material of the future. “The process developed as an outcome of this cooperation project is the first in the world to produce an ecological lactic-acid polymer from the side streams of soy production,” says Henri Nieminen, CEO of Finnfoam. “This way, we can offer a sustainable alternative to sugar- and corn-based polylactic acid (PLA),” he says.
Soy molasses, which is not suitable for food, has previously been disposed of by incineration. Producing bioplastic from this residue of soy processing has huge potential as a scalable export product in the circular economy. Globally, residues from soy production could produce around 22 million metric tons (m.t.) of bioplastic per year.