Our problem
Bio-based plastics are hard to manufacture. Getting them to work takes slow, costly trial and error, and often produces poor-quality parts. That is why so many never make it into real products.
It comes down to one machine
Almost everything plastic around you was made the same way. Small pellets of plastic are melted in a heated tube, pushed into a steel mould under high pressure, and held there until they cool into a solid shape.
Four things have to be right: how hot the plastic is, how hard it is pushed in, how quickly, and how long it is left to cool. The right answers change with every material and every product.
Seventy years against ten
Polypropylene is the plastic in yoghurt pots and bottle caps. It has been moulded since the 1950s, and every factory that runs it has inherited decades of settings, fixes and rules of thumb.
Bio-based plastics have only been made at scale for a fraction of that time, and there are dozens of versions of them, each behaving differently. There is no manual to inherit.
And it is far less forgiving
Polypropylene works across a wide range of temperatures, so a rough guess still gets you a usable part. PHA gives you about ten degrees between melting properly and burning.
Too hot and it breaks apart inside the machine before it reaches the mould. Too cold and it sets solid halfway in, leaving a half-formed part.
So the factory guesses
Parts come out half-filled, bent, dented, or so brittle they snap when you pick them up. Every attempt books machine time, uses material and fills a bin.
It can take a dozen tries before a part is good enough to sell, and that is for one material, on one product, on one machine.
That is why so many never make it into real products.
