PHB Industrial
Planned to start its operations in 2008, new plant will produce
biocycle, a biodegradable plastic whose raw material is sugar

Davi Molinari

The Pedra Sugar Mill, in Serrana, in the region of Ribeirão Preto, in the State of São Paulo, is Brazil’s main producer of sugar-derived plastic. Amid the vast sugarcane fields operates since 2002 a pilot plant of PHB. PHB is the abbreviation of polyhydroxibutirate, name of an organic composite synthesized by bacteria-eating sugar with properties similar to plastics – which are organic composites as well, but oil-derived instead. The company that has built the plant and is in charge of its operation has the same name: PHB Industrial S/A. The pilot plant is not at the Pedra Sugar Mill by chance: the company is the result of an association between the Irmãos Biagi Group, the sugar mill owner, with the Balbo Group, also in the sugar and alcohol industry. Besides the pilot plant, PHB also owns a registered trademark, biocycle. That’s the name of the PHB product manufactured in Serrana.

The partners have invested approximately US$ 14 million in the pilot plant, which currently produces 60 tons of biocycle a year. It operates 24 hours a day and has 18 employees. Practically its entire production is exported to companies in the United States, Japan and Germany – with which there are confidentiality contracts that prevent their identification. Current sales and output are not worth the investment. A new industrial plant planned to begin operations by 2008 will make possible to put into the plastics market 10,000 tons of PHB a year. “With this production scale we will begin to have a return to the investment and to change the plastics market’s profile,” says Jefter Fernandes do Nascimento, the engineer of materials who coordinates the research and development project for the improvement of the process for obtaining PHB financed through the Technological Innovation in Small Business Program (Programa Inovação Tecnológica em Pequenas Empresas, Pipe) of the State of São Paulo Research Foundation (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo).

But why would biocycle change the profile of the plastics market, as the engineer says it will? Because PHB is biodegradable. Packing made with PHB — the use in which the company bets the most —, when put away, “turns” into water and carbonic gas in six to 12 months. The conventional plastic most frequently used in packing – polypropylene, an oil-derived product – takes 200 years to decompose.

PHB is not the only biodegradable plastic available in the market. Today there are four different classes of them – but none as good in the biodegradability category though. Another advantage is the price: according to the professionals involved in the project, a kilogram of the sugarcane polymer costs US$ 5, whereas a kilogram of other biodegradable plastics, made from beet or corn, for instance, costs US$ 14. One of the reasons for the competitive price comes from the fact that the factory’s facilities are entirely self-sufficient: sugarcane provides the raw material, the sugar and a special type of alcohol, called superior, used in the manufacturing’s last stage. Sugarcane bagasse is used to generate electric power and steam, required by the industrial process. “The gimmick was the elaboration of a process that didn’t depend on external energy. That dropped the price to a commercial level,” says José Geraldo da Cruz Pradella, a researcher at the Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas (Institute for Technology Research, IPT) involved in the 20-year history that led to the PHB Industrial’s pilot plant.

Today the world produces 200 million tons a year of polypropylene. “PHB is not indicated to replace all the uses of polypropylene, but in the next years it will take between 1% and 2% of that market, “ says Nascimento, who got a Master’s Degree in chemical engineering from the State University of Campinas (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Unicamp) in 2001. The project he elaborated and that the company submitted to Fapesp will get, until it’s finished, almost US$ 382,000. It went through Phase I, in 2001, to prove the product’s viability; then, in Phase II, it showed that PHB production is possible; finally, in the end of 2004, it was selected for Phase III — in which the resources for setting up a laboratory for determining the physical and thermal-mechanical characteristics of PHB came. “Characterization was essential for calibrating the production process,” explains the coordinator.

The crucial step to increase production scale was mastering the specifications for the production of PHB-made pellets. Polypropylene is sold in pellets – small plastic balls that are melted together in machines to produce different packaging. That part was also funded by Pipe’s resources. This November Injecom, a company from São Paulo that produces injected plastic objects, will launch a packaging for eucalyptus seedlings made with PHB plastic. Three months after the seedling has been planted the PHB degrades into the soil. Productivity increases – and that already interests large paper and pulp plants.

Continuing public investment

Pipe was not the first public investment program to support the research and development activities that led to the product PHB Industrial manufactures — it was the Brazilian Innovation Agency/Research and Projects Financing (Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Finep). With resources from the Programa de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (Support Program for Scientific and Technological Development, PADCT), the agency invested on it about US$ 2,28 million. But the initiative to work towards bioplastic began with the now defunct Proálcool – the program created by the Brazilian government in the 1970s, after the first oil shock, to turn alcohol into an alternative to oil. In the end of the 1980s the program entrusted the Centro de Tecnologia da Copersucar (Copersucar Technology Center, of the then Cooperative of Sugar and Alcohol Producers) — today Centro de Tecnologia Canavieira (Center for Sugarcane Technology, CTC) – with searching for new alternatives to sugarcane use. At the time, chemical engineer Carlos Rossell, a PhD in food engineering from Unicamp, was working at the center. “Back then there was already an economic vision for the long run, associated with an environmental vision. We believed it was possible to produce in large scale a substitute for petrochemical plastic,” he recalls. Later, he became one of the project’s coordinators.

CTC strategically looked for partners that could face the challenge. “A critical mass of 25 scientists was put together, something unheard of in Brazil,” remembers Rossell. A research group from the Institute of Biomedical Sciences (Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas, ICB), of the University of São Paulo (Universidade de São Paulo, USP), led by biologist Ana Clara Schemberg, selected the bacterium — Alcaligenes eutrophus, found in sugarcane fields’ soil — and produced a transgenic variety that is more efficient in synthesizing PHB.

In the meantime, IPT and CTC looked for a technological solution for the fermentation process, in which the plastic “producing” bacteria multiply, fed by a mixture that contains sugar; and for the extraction of PHB from them. IPT tested more than 300 bacteria species. When it became clear that the industrial process was feasible, CTC submitted the project to its sugar and alcohol producing members: only the Balbo and Biagi groups were willing to face the challenge. The project for the pilot unit in Serrana was elaborated in 1997. The plant went through several changes before reaching its current producing process. “Reality showed us that it’s not enough to take the raw material and turn it into a product with the lowest possible cost: we lacked business know-how,” states Rossell.

The engineer explains that each use – flask, bottle or film (as is called the plastic used in bags) – requires a different composition of the final product. “We lacked an adjustment to the market’s demand that reflected in the production process. That’s when we established a partnership with the Department of Materials Engineering [Departamento de Engenharia de Materiais] of UFSCar [Universidade Federal de São Carlos, or São Carlos Federal University], which made possible for us to come to a production technology for injected and blown plastics,” Rossell tells.

The project resulted in five patents. Three of them belong to IPT and CTC; two, to USP and CTC. The patents describe the process of PHB production, fermentation and extraction. All of them have been licensed to PHB Industrial S/A, which pays the holders of the intellectual property 3% of the plant’s sales in royalties. The process in stages organizes the plant’s operation, which is divided into three main blocks: fermentation, in which the bacteria reproduce and synthesize the polymer; extraction, in which the polymer is taken out of the bacteria; and purification and drying, in which the organic residues – in other words, bacteria remains – are eliminated from the polymer.

Reaching the market

Today the market is preparing itself for new uses for biodegradable plastic In addition to Injecom, the company that in November starts to sell eucalyptus seedlings placed in PHB packaging – in this market, those packages are called tubets –, Votorantim and International Papers, both of them giants in the pulp and paper industry, are on the list of interested companies in the new project. Injecom promises cost reduction and productivity gains. Currently, explains Marcos Maglio, the company’s owner, the eucalyptus in vitro reproduction process is carried out in conventional plastic tubets. The small seedlings come out of the seed bed in those plastic tubes, from which they are taken out before being planted in the soil.

Conventional plastic tubets are reusable, but the costs for transporting, washing, sterilizing and replacing them amount to 20%. Tests made in PHB tubets have shown that, since the seedlings are planted directly into the soil, the elimination of handling prevents contamination, which affects 20% of the plants when conventional tubets are used. “The increase in productivity will result in a strong demand for biodegradable tubets – for the eucalyptus culture, but also to coffee, pupunha (known as spiny peachpalm) and papaya, “says a hopeful Maglio.

Because it is biocompatible, PHB will also be used in medicine. It can be transformed, for instance, into suturing threads that the organism will eventually absorb. Computer manufacturers also study replacing the petrochemical plastic by biodegradable plastic in their products, which become trash very quickly and clog up garbage dumps. In Germany, for example, environmental laws are increasingly rigid and are forcing companies to find a destination for their own trash.

Credit balance

In those 20 years of research, all the institutes involved in the project were able to use the knowledge they acquired for the development of other technologies. IPT, for instance, got three more patents for polymers made from other raw materials, such as sugarcane bagasse, rice straw and wood residues. “Now we are studying how to use diesel and vegetable oil residues, and even whey,” says Pradella. “The institutes have achieved the knowledge needed for establishing a technology that becomes industrial production. They learned how to make research interact in three levels: basic, technological and industrial,” believes Rossell.

In this interaction process of academia, research and industry, all the professionals that were interviewed highlighted the role of researcher Celso Lellis Bueno Netto, a chemical engineer from USP’s Polytechnical School (Escola Politécnica, Poli) and a PhD in biotechnology from Toulouse, in France. Bueno Netto, who died in 2004, headed the PHB project for almost ten years. “He coordinated the research groups at USP and had an important participation in the project’s management,” says Rossell. “Bueno Netto was an enthusiast of the project. He bought the idea in such a way it made us feel safe with the goal we were pursuing. It was his idea the audacity of putting together 20 researchers, 56 technicians and 20 students around something that, in the beginning, sounded like science fiction to me,” recognizes Pratella.