Kemira and DuPont Nutrition and Biosciences partner for development and commercialization of new breakthrough biomaterials

Kemira and DuPont Nutrition and Biosciences partner for development and commercialization of new breakthrough biomaterials

The two companies join forces to commercialize applications of new tailored biomaterials and biobased chemicals, based on DuPont’s breakthrough biotechnology platform. Kemira’s role in the collaboration will be to co-develop and commercialize a range of new biobased and biodegradable products across Kemira’s key product lines.

Global biotechnology giant DuPont and Kemira, a global leader in sustainable chemical solutions for water intensive industries announced today an exclusive partnership for the development and commercialization of DuPont’s enzymatic biomaterial platform technology. This collaboration will allow both partners to commercialize a range of new, biobased and biodegradable products in their respective core markets in the upcoming years.

Under the terms of the partnership Kemira will gain access to DuPont’s new and unique biomaterial technology, known as the engineered polysaccharide platform. It enables production of a variety of biomaterials that can be used to enhance sustainability, biobased content and biodegradability across different product lines and applications. The platform utilizes sustainable plant-based sugars as raw materials and proprietary enzymes catalyst for the reaction. The technology readiness of the production platform is at advanced pilot scale and the technology can be scaled up to global level.

Kemira’s role in the partnership will be to provide the application development expertise and market access required to leverage the full potential of the technology in Kemira’s core markets such as paper and board industry, water treatment as well as oil & gas industries. Kemira will be the exclusive provider of the new biomaterials to its core markets, while DuPont will continue to develop and commercialize the platform for other applications in DuPont’s own target markets.

“Our partnership with DuPont is a major milestone on our strategic journey to deliver high quality, sustainable and biobased products to our core markets. The versatility and scalability of this exciting new platform will allow us to leverage the technology across our key product lines. These new biomaterials can be used in multiple applications including municipal and industrial water treatment as well as in packaging and board applications to improve e.g. strength and barrier properties. Sustainability is one of the main drivers of Kemira’s long-term growth and our target is to reach biobased revenue of over 500 million euros by 2030.” says Antti Matula, SVP, Global Product Lines & Business Development for Kemira Pulp & Paper.

“This new technology will transform industrial products, providing sustainable material options for a range of important end use markets,” said Christian Lenges, Venture Director for Biomaterials, DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences. “We are thrilled to be entering the development and commercialization phase with Kemira, and to provide access to a range of new biomaterials which are scalable on a global level, renewable and even higher-performing compared to traditional materials.”

Enzymatic polymerization process technology

The DuPont enzymatic polymerization process technology applies biotechnology tools to access sugar-based biopolymers (polysaccharides) at an industrial scale to enable broad material applications. The underlying new material innovation – for the first time – allows for the controlled enzymatic polymerization of sugar (sucrose) into glucose polymers (polysaccharides) under controlled, enzyme catalyzed polymerization conditions. This approach enables the specific and designed synthesis of nature-identical polysaccharides with high purity, controlled structural material properties and morphologies.