Has Pond cracked the code for really good bioplastics? It certainly looks like it! DVN Interior visited Pond Global in Århus, Denmark in a snowy winter scene near the industrial harbor, on the very last tip of one of the main piers. A James Bond experience with magic secret formulas involved!
The company was founded by two former Siemens Windpower employees, who saw the enormous amount of epoxy being used and wanted to make a bio version of it. Cofounder Thomas Brorsen Pedersen told us about his background as a machine engineer. He did a project in conjunction with research being done with Scania, a composite seat with flax fiber.
His fellow inventor is Martin Jensen. They started 15 years ago but found their magic recipe in 2015 – using a conventional stove and cooking utensils in Thomas’ cellar. The first version was the B component, the binder in a fully-bio-based epoxy replacement.
The ingredients are secret, but it’s a mix of around 18 different minerals and biobased materials. The recipe is written on a paper in a safe, and is nowhere digitally to avoid it becoming public (much like Coca-Cola!).
The base molecule mimics the epoxy molecule, and derives from Lactic acid into lactate which is produced from any kind of carbohydrate. Thomas mentioned that they can make the magic ingredient from the outer shells of the wheat discarded while making flour. Or from the scraps from pressing fruit juice.
They have a project with a juice company, aiming to produce a biobottle for their juice by using the waste sidestream from making the juice itself.
These new molecules create a strong covalent bond to many important materials, like glassfibre, flax, hemp, coconut, banana leaves, palm leaves, grass and others. Basically, the material is all based on sugar from various bio sources. The bond is much stronger than that of epoxy.
My first visit to Pond was in December 2019 and it was nice to see the progress since then, even though the office and facilities looked pretty much the same. Their product is now called Pond Cycle.
To explain exactly what is magic about this, one can read on their webpage: “Pond Cycle is a fully biobased enhancer system utilized in combination with lactide and polymerized lactide (PLA). Lactide is the most abundant monomer building block found in nature suitable to substitute fossil-based building blocks for conventional polymers. Lactide is sourced from bacteria eating carbohydrates, opening vast volumes of potential feedstock from bio-waste in all regions. Pond Cycle is made 100% from regenerative and recyclable resources.”
So, it is an additive to be admixed with conventional PLA (frequently used in 3D printers) that anyone can buy from various suppliers. The mix is approximately 84% conventional PLA and 16% Pond Cycle. When mixed, the bioplastic’s properties are similar to conventional petroleum-based plastics, and sometimes even better.
One could say Pond is rebuilding the PLA chemically. When trying to find the recipe they looked for other chemical structures in plants and tried to replicate those structures.
When their material is heated to 200 ºC, it will vaporize and the lactide monomer can be retrieved and recycled.
Pond is part of a project in Medellìn, Colombia, where they produce a lot of the world’s coffee. When picking the coffee bean it’s like a berry. The outer mucilage (berry meat) is removed, leaving the bean itself, which later is roasted and processed. That mucilage, the berry meat, contains a lot of sugar and is a great source for PLA. Pond estimates that all the feedstock waste from coffee production could replace nearly all the need for plastic in the world if converted the Pond way.
One result from that project is a tee shirt fully made of the Pond material, spun into yarns.
We got to see the very first reactor they built to produce the material, and to break down the material to its original ingredients. Thomas told us how they have made textile yarns of the material and that Adidas have used it to produce shirts and shoes. The tee-shirts have been tested for fully degrading in a reactor that can separate all the materials. If you have a mix of cotton and their material in a T shirt the cotton and the lactide will separate.
Pond’s rig for testing how the material degenerates over time is a scientific apparatus used in other industries to verify how sustainable a material is. It measures the CO2 released (if I remember correct) and other parameters. The degradation of the material is made with the right temperature, moisture and bacteria.
They also have a home composting machine like this one, that you can have in your kitchen to compost your food waste directly. When putting a Pond Cycle part in that machine, like a hard injection-molded part made with their material, the part is gone in 2 days!
So, will bacteria eventually eat your car interior if the right moisture and temperature are present? No, because those conditions aren’t within the range of what an automobile in service experiences.
We also discussed the usage in cars and here they already have a lot of OEMs onboard who invested in the company early on.
You can do the textiles for the interiors (Substitute PET yarns). ABS and polycarbonate can be replaced, with better properties. They can do PA yarns, elastane (soon), and Nylon-like materials. More than 200 materials with petro-plastic counterparts can be made. You can use glue with their material, and Pond Cycle can be used as binder in natural fiber parts. So, you could do a door panel with flax fibers bonded with Pond material (Instead of PP) and glue a textile material to that, both made with the Pond material too. Result: a highly bio-based door panel.
They have even developed a monolithic material where the flax is replaced with fibers spun from their material, meaning you can do a stiff composite part all in the same material, with properties like a NFPP part or even a carbon fiber part – all bio based!
Pond is testing automotive parts made with this approach already.
