(Plastemart) -- Penford Corporation, a company with significant business and expertise in specialty starches and sustainable bio-products and Novomer Inc., a new materials company pioneering a family of high-performance plastics and polymers using renewable feedstocks such as carbon dioxide, announce that they have entered into a Joint Development Agreement that will leverage the two companies' core technologies and expertise. he new alliance was created to accelerate the development and commercialization of innovative Starch-Polypropylene Carbonate polymer composites.
Unmodified starch use has been limited due to inherent performance characteristics but has long been targeted as a cost effective, renewable material for a broad range of packaging applications. When modified, specialty starches can be compatible with other polymers to extend the use and modify the properties of those polymers for targeted uses.
Polypropylene Carbonate (PPC), a thermoplastic polymer composed of nearly 50% by weight of waste CO2, has superior mechanical and barrier properties and a chemical backbone that is compatible and likely synergistic with specialty modified starch. It is anticipated that the creation of starch-PPC composites will yield low cost, environmentally sustainable packaging polymers suitable for the multi-billion dollar global packaging materials market.