Two new UBC startups fighting plastic pollution

Plastic pollution is a scourge of modern life, wreaking havoc on sensitive ecosystems and causing microplastics to enter the food chain.

But two new ventures made up of University of B.C. researchers are working on solutions to the ecological crisis.

One is Bioform Technologies, a UBC startup that turns kelp and wood fibre into compostable bioplastic, while the other is A2O Advanced Materials Inc., which is testing self-healing polymers that can prolong the life of industrial materials.

Damon Gilmour, a chemist and vice-president of research at A2O, said their startup was incorporated just last year and they're still working out of UBC with a small team. They're planning to scale-up the company and move to a location in Vancouver.

He has been working with their technology — an adhesive chemical compound that regenerates — since 2019. The discovery of the new polymer was a collaboration between the chemistry and chemical and biological engineering departments at UBC.

“What we discovered really early on was they had really unique and interesting physical properties. And what really caught our mind was that these materials had crazy adhesion and they stuck to almost any surface we use,” said Gilmour on Thursday. “You could almost call these materials alive. They have the ability to respond to stimuli and are self-healing.”

For example, he explained a typical plastic material won't move but these polymers have an attraction to one another so that when the material is broken, and then placed back together, the polymer chains want to re-fuse together.

“And they do that through hydrogen bonding, which is the same phenomenon that gives water interesting properties,” he said.

With this technology, the business can create adhesives and coatings that can prolong the life of products. One of their goals is to provide a new marine coating, which can reduce the amount of time that ships need to come out of the water to be repainted.

The coatings used in the marine industry contain microplastics and copper biocide, and need to be replaced every few years, said Gilmore. “It results in huge amounts of paint and toxic biocide that gets deposited into the water system. So we're actually using our material to replace those paints with sustainable material that does not release into the water system.”

A2O is also looking at other practical applications to make products more sustainable, for example they're researching whether their technology could be put into different kinds of electrical devices to extend their effective lifetimes.

The other UBC sustainable venture, Bioform Technologies, also works out of the university with a small team of six full-time staff but has plans to scale-up commercial production in the Metro Vancouver region.

Bioform has created a thin but durable bioplastic from wood fibre and kelp that can be used for agricultural mulch film or rigid packaging products such as beverage lids and takeout containers.

Jordan Mackenzie is the CEO and a co-founder of Bioform. They incorporated in 2019 but have been working on the technology since 2016. Mackenzie said their company uses regenerative materials to create products that sustainably eliminate plastic waste.