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13-hour time difference, that presents a bit of a challenge, but the business community is very welcoming and the government agencies you have to deal with are very helpful.” While it can take several years to finance and permit a biorefinery project in the U.S., Silento says GlycosBio will break ground on its facility after only 18 months of work. “That is a very short timeframe,” he says. “You can move very quickly in that part of world. If you have willing participants and you want to move aggressively from a schedule perspective, you certainly can.” Bioamber, a joint venture between U.S.-based DNP Green Technology and France-based Agro-industrie Recherches et Développements (ARD), also intends to build a commercialscale biorefinery in Asia in the future. In the short, term how-
ever, the company has taken a different approach to penetrating the Asian market. Bioamber (see page 15) recently signed an agreement with Mitsui & Co. Ltd. granting the global trading company exclusive Asian distribution rights for its biobased succinic acid. While the Asian market offers the biggest growth opportunity for biobased chemicals, DNP Green Technology President Jean-Francois Huc says it can be a difficult market for Western companies to penetrate. Vice president of NDP Green Technology Mike Hartmann says being a small, private U.S. company can make it challenging to meet with the large chemical companies in Asia. “Mitsui & Co. has been instrumental in opening doors. It gives us a lot of credibility,” he says.
Sifting Through the Ecobabble Novozymes joins consortium of big-name corporations spearheading product sustainability BY LUKE GEIVER Grouping big name companies WalMart, Dell and Disney sounds like a global plot to sell Mickey Mouse computer monitors to the masses. But add the bioinnovation company Novozymes Inc. to the mix and the partnership takes on a completely different tone. In August, Novozymes joined several giant companies (Wal-Mart, BASF, and others) along with academic institutions, governments and NGO’s as part of the Sustainability Consortium. Now, the
PHOTO: SUSTAINABILITY CONSORTIUM
work of the consortium because it is one of the primary methods for comparing the environmental sustainability of products and processes for improving them.” The Sustainability Consortium, part of the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University, is working “to create globally accepted standards for measuring and reporting the environmental and social impacts of consumer products to retailers and institutional buyers,” according to Lisa Firestone, operations director. “Society must find new ways to meet the needs of a growing population while reducing our impact on the environment,” says Claus Stig Pedersen, Novozymes head of sustainability. “In short, we must produce more with less.” While the chances that any of the consortium’s participants start the move to downsize anyConsumer Conscience More and more consumers demand green products, and the Sustainability Consortium helps retailers provide more time soon may be slim, Monroe environmentally responsible goods. says it was a natural extension to consortium will have the ability to analyze join a group of stakeholders with “similar the life-cycle assessment of everything ambitions” and “the resources to create a from keypads to color crayons. substantial impact.” To create a worldwide “Novozymes brings a long experistandard, Firestone says the consortium ence and well-developed understanding of will act as “a research body that examines life cycle assessment, a tool for measuring consumer product sustainability from the a product’s environmental impact,” says perspectives of information systems, meaAdam Monroe, Novozymes North Ameri- surement science, consumer science and can president. “This tool is central for the systems science.”
Monroe says Novozymes also brings an in-depth understanding of biotechnology’s role in making consumer products and supply chains more sustainable with an experience in industries ranging from detergents to textiles. Firestone says to join Monroe and the other members of the consortium, which also includes 3M, Best Buy and Monsanto, to name a few, a prospective company or organization must supply an annual membership fee and commit to the consortium for three years. “There are two tiers of membership allowing various levels of involvement,” Firestone says. “These tiers are different for small versus large companies, and different government entities. There is an application process, but no fee for NGOs.” Membership for a Tier One large company is $100,000 per year, $50,000 for Tier Two and $25,000 and $10,000 for small businesses. The consortium states that “we are bombarded with companies who say their conscience is green.” Novozymes’ involvement looks like an important addition to meet the goals of the organization as those in the biofuels sector know, LCA is an ever-present factor influencing a product’s sustainability. Fortunately, the consortium seeks to answer one of its self-imposed questions, “What is real and what is ecobabble?”
INAUGURAL ISSUE 2010 | Biorefining | 19