Startups Building a Sustainable Society (3): Mango Materials Produces Bioplastics from Methane
Efforts are underway to solve the inevitable environmental issue of plastics.
Written by the Universe editorial team
To create a society where everyone can live in peace, startups’ initiatives including decarbonization and diversity are increasingly called for. In this series of articles covering specific examples of ESG initiatives, we previously introduced shizai, a Japanese startup streamlining packaging that is essential for consumer experience. In this article, we will focus on plastics.
When we think about the environment, we cannot ignore plastics. In addition to avoiding using plastics as much as possible, there has been considerable progress in converting materials to eco-friendly ones.
Silicon Valley-based Mango Materials is a unique startup that produces bioplastics from methane. It is a biotech startup and can also be considered a climate tech startup that can contribute to methane fixation (methane is also a greenhouse gas (GHG) like carbon dioxide) to tackle climate change.
The company was founded in 2010 by Molly Morse, a biopolymers engineer; Allison Pieja, a civil and environmental engineer; and Anne Schauer-Gimenez, an environmental microbiologist.
Methane is produced, for example, through the life activities of animals. In addition to human excrements and sewage sediments, burps of 1.5 billion livestock cows in the world have been a serious cause of global warming in recent years.
If methane, combustible at room temperature, can be collected efficiently, it can be used as energy by burning it. However, as carbon dioxide is produced by burning methane, development of cost-effective fixation technologies (such as photosynthesis by plants for carbon dioxide) has been hoped for.
The company has developed a technology that uses bacteria to produce PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate), a bioplastic. The bacteria used in this process is said to feed on methane to produce PHA.
PHA is a biodegradable polymer that can be degraded in the natural environment including the ocean, reducing the risk of causing the so-called microplastic problems. Mango Materials has succeeded in supplying easy-to-mold PHA pellets to various industries.
The technology has received high market recognition, including the selection by NASA in 2020 as a promising space technology for commercial flight testing. Currently, PHA pellets are produced using methane generated at “Silicon Valley Clean Water,” a wastewater treatment plant, and waste treatment plants around Silicon Valley. In the future, the company intends to expand its business by securing methane also from dairy farms and other wastewater treatment plants.
Like other startups’ business models, Mango Materials is building its business mainly around licensing local business partners and providing them with technologies and know-how to produce PHA using bacteria based on business alliances, instead of building a large-scale PHA production facility on its own.
So far, we have introduced the environmental efforts of shizai that streamlines packaging and Mango Materials that produces bioplastics from methane.
Ultimately, if packaging and petroleum-derived plastics were eliminated, the environmental impact would be significantly reduced. However, in today’s civilized society, they clearly have a significant impact on product experience.
Going forward, in addition to working on materials and manufacturing methods, startups need to be able to deliver information about such efforts in an easy-to-understand and trustworthy way.
In the next several articles, we will discuss several initiatives related to "S”(Social) of ESG.