GROW
Shahriar Nafici and Florence Miremadi-Nafici at the Rushlight Awards
goes inside cardboard). We had our first commercial production at that plant, using 10 per cent of our pulp mixed with recycled paper, produced on big rolls. We are now preparing to build our first commercial plant.
plant. The purpose will be to produce unbleached pulp that will be used for different applications, but mainly for moulded products.
How have you protected your intellectual property?
Where will you build your first commercial plant?
Once we had finalised the different aspects of our eco-pulping process, we had to decide whether to patent the technology or not. It was a very difficult decision to make because when you patent, you have to disclose your intellectual property. In the end we decided to file a patent, and we are now very happy that we did. We filed the patent in 2014, and the UK patent was granted in June 2017. The next difficult step was to choose the territories outside the UK in which to patent our technology. In the end, we chose the key countries where there is most surplus
That is the question! Last year, we didn’t know where we would build the first commercial plant. We hope it is going to be in the UK, and we are now close to getting the funding. In most cases, we won’t actually own the production plants. We will build the plants with sub-contractors, license our technology, and receive a license fee or royalty from the pulp production. So there is the potential to develop several types of commercial projects. In the case of the UK, an investor will own the production 53
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