SOLVE

Despite ongoing efforts to improve the plastic waste collection rate, this is exceptionally challenging for polymeric materials that are soluble in water. These versatile materials are widely used across industries such as food, pharmaceuticals, paper, construction, adhesives, textiles, and coatings. This type of plastic is disposed in wastewater rather than in plastic collection systems and biodegradation is not self-evident, and hence leads to microplastics. As the most extensively used water-soluble polymer, polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH) is a major cause for such concern. This project is scaling a solution that can be a sustainable alternative for PVOH and slower soluble wrapping films in general in the extensive market of every day packaging materials. B4Plastics (B4P) is a Belgian polymer architecture company, catalysing the introduction of novel biomaterials and growing them from niche to bulk applications (https://b4plastics.com). Our vision is to redesign tomorrow’s plastics. Today. In order to achieve this, it is our ambition to develop renewable and / or biodegradable materials that have an unprecedented balance between ecology, functionality and price. Through B4P’s unique library of bio-based and locally sourced building blocks, polyester-based alternatives could be produced and tuned to achieve comparable material properties, which has resulted in SOLUBAN®. SOLUBAN® can replace PVOH in many applications at biobased content ranging up to 100% by the end of the forelaying project SOLVE, but without the harmful effects to the environment. The specific focus of this application is to scale and accelerate SOLUBAN®, from TRL 6 to TRL 8, and to accelerate market uptake and all the commercial and sustainable advantages that come with that. B4Plastics has plans, including all permissions, to expand the in-house facilities to allow for production capacity of 10.000 T/year 2026-2035.