The huge quantity of pits discarded by the Mexican avocado food product industry is about to become one of the latest feedstocks for bioplastics. The Mexican company Biofase has developed a 100 percent biodegradable, compostable polymer made from avocado pits and is offering the polymer for use as either resins or additives.
We've discussed other bioplastics and biofuels that use agricultural-industrial waste as feedstocks. The latest one means companies making avocado products in Mexico will no longer need to pay third parties to haul away the pits. Scott Munguia, co-founder of Biofase, told FreshFruitPortal.com that the Mexican avocado industry discards 30,000 metric tons of pits each month.
Biofase has patented its new bioplastic material and the process it developed for converting the monomer in avocado pits. Munguia said his company is looking for other raw biomaterials with the same monomer.
The company is offering two different product lines: the Biocom biodegradable and compostable thermoplastic resins (which are made from renewable sources for the manufacture of plastic products) and biodegradable additives such as Bioblend, which can be blended with petroleum products such as polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, polystyrene, and cellulose polymers to make them partially biodegradable. Biofase will formally enter the market this year and is projecting production rates of 30 metric tons a month.
Biofase is negotiating with Mexican fertilizer companies interested in using its resins in their plastic packaging, and it is talking to Mexican supermarkets about using the resins in plastic bags. The company is confining its material sources and sales to Mexico for the time being. According to Munguia, the bioplastic market in Mexico is growing at a rate of 20 percent per year.
Biofase is also considering whether to develop its own line of biodegradable, compostable food service items, including cutlery, bags, and cups.
We've thought about having ourselves produce the products directly but we'll need to capitalize on the company. For example, in Mexico, the regulations are more beneficial for bags than injectable products, so we want to see how these government regulation trends develop and if it grows and what would be best to invest in. We're going in but we want to wait for the market to show clearer trends.
The five founders of Biofase -- Munguia, Mauricio Valdes, Carolina Cavazos, Everardo Padilla, and Juan A. Osorio -- developed the technology as a student project at the Tecnologico de Monterrey Campus. In February 2012, the team won first prize in the northeast Mexico FRISA Award competition for Entrepreneurial Development. In July, Biofase was named one of the 20 most promising green companies in Mexico during the Cleantech Challenge Mexico 2012 event, where it received the Technological Innovation Award.
Great job for turning a cost outlay into a profit. I applaud the innovative initiative to take a previous waste product and turn it into a productive product and a new revenue stream (not to mention reducing waste to the environment).
I agree, Greg--good to see not just a great idea for using a natural resource to create a biodegradeable plastic but also showing the financial benefit to doing so, which often is how naysayers dismiss such initiatives. I love this idea, of course, especially as someone who consciously limits my use of single-use plastic because I know the truth about it--it can only be recycled once and ultimately ends up in landfills or in the ocean. And again, it's taking a country outside of the U.S. to lead the way on an environmental business move. Will definitely be keeping an eye on how this and similar ideas pan out.
Ann, thanks for posting this. Also, thanks for linking to a Spanish-language website. It's an unfortunate fact that English speakers often ignore anything in other languages -- as though anything important must necessarily be in English.
Tec de Monterrey is very well known for integrating engineering and business, so it's perhaps not surprising that this company was founded by Tec students.
By the way, the cheerful "¡Aguacates de México!" jingle -- which is familiar to anyone who listens to Spanish-language radio in the U.S. -- is now stuck in my head after reading this article.
Dave, glad you enjoyed the article. I adore avocados and would eat them everyday if they were in season locally in Northern California. That's one reason I was attracted to this story. Using Google Translate was a pain, but I'm good at figuring out bad translations into English, plus I absorbed a lot of Spanish when living in LA and hanging with my brother's in-laws from Mexico. I'm also familiar with Tec de Monterrey, so was not surprised that this innovation began there as a student project.
I second Dave's comments. Anytime we can take a waste product like this and convert it to a useful and economic product - we get one step closer to sustainable living. Our planet will thank us in the long run for efforts like these. Thanks for the article, Ann. It was a bright spot in my day.
Ann, your article leads me to believe each material requires its own unique process to become a plastic. Avocado pits need one, corn needs a different one.
Is this true? Is the grail of the bioplastic industry a universal process?
TJ, the answer is kind of yes and no, depending on what part of the process you mean. It's the front end where things are really different, depending on what the feedstock is and whether it's starch-based or cellulose-based (or yet others). Once you've figured out how to convert it into ethanol you're home free. But that conversion is different for different feedstocks, depending on, among other things, the monomer, which is why Biofase wants to find other feedstock candidates with the same monomer so they can use their process on it. And the conversion can contain multiple steps--or not. There are lots of research efforts afoot to simplify that front-end process. If there's a holy grail, it might be there.
30,000 metric tons a month, of just avocado pits. One source on the web says an average avocado seed weighs 7.584 ounces (.215 kg, or .000215 metric tons).
@TJ McDermott: Mexico produces about 1.3 million metric tons of avocados per year, so 30,000 metric tons per month of seeds (360,000 metric tons per year) being disposed of by industry seems reasonable.
Avocados are either sold whole (in which case the industry isn't responsible for disposing of the seeds), or else processed into other products (guacamole, avocado oil, etc.).
I'm going to guestimate that about 75% of the weight of an avocado is contained in the seed. That would mean that 1.3 million metric tons of avocados (i.e. the entire annual crop) yields 975,000 metric tons of seeds.
If industry has to dispose of 360,000 metric tons of seeds per year, that means that about 40% of the avocados are processed, and 60% are being sold as primary product (whole avocados). That makes sense to me.
1.3 million metric tons is about 4.3 billion avocados -- which sounds like a lot -- but if we assume that all Mexican avocados are consumed either in the U.S. or Mexico (combined population about 430 million), that's only 10 avocados per person per year (or 6, if you only don't count processed avocados).
Each member of my family eats at least one avocado per week, so we're definitely exceeding our quota.
Great article as usual. As always with these introductory articles, they open the door to a lot of questions. Mike and I were wondering the following:
When does the degradation kick in? After exposure to what? Into what components does it break down?
All of these lead to our most important question, from a manufacturer of plastic components point of view - what is the impact of a biodegradable additive that is combined with PP or PE?
- Does it eliminate the possibility of recycling PP and PE materials into like product.
- Will it prevent recycled plastics from having properties comparable to plastics without the additive?
- Does the partially degraded bioplastic remain in recycled PP and PE or does the additive (and any components it has broken down into) burn off during recompounding or remelting?
While a 100% compostable product makes a lot of sense, a partially decomposing one might not if it prevents or negatively impacts the recyclability of the PE or PP.
All good questions, Clint. None of the Biofase-specific answers are immediately available on Biofase's website. I looked for such information--after using Google Translate, but this effort is quite new: the company was started early last year. I hope they publish a paper on the subject soon. Regarding compostability and recycling: most participants in the bioplastic industry say that recycling is the first "best use", and compostability comes second. Making a bioplastic compostable is usually aimed at food-service or other single-use items--as Biofase is doing--since the idea there is at least if the items are thrown in the trash (as they often are, as Elizabeth's comment points out), it's better to be compostable and/or be biodegradable in a landfill. We covered this here: http://www.designnews.com/author.
Thanks for the article. It would be a great cycle to see the bio-plastic from avocado pits made into biodegradable take out containers! With such a high volume of raw material, the price may be reasonable.
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