Charles Dimmler
CEO and Co-founder, Checkerspot, Inc
Industrial biotechnology is uniquely positioned to provide more sustainable access to both existing or better performing alternatives for chemicals and materials used in everyday products and applications - from textiles and polymers to industrial solvents. This session will highlight several examples of technologies that have been developed and scaled to enable novel, sustainable products made through biotechnology.
Read more about this session's speakers below:
Sustainable Chemicals and Materials
10:00-10:30 AM: "Biotechnology: Creating Performance Materials and Ingredients"
Charles Dimmler, CEO and Co-founder, Checkerspot, Inc
The world relies on unsustainable sources of oil and fossil fuels. We accelerate the adoption of renewable, bio-based products, to positively impact people and the planet. Many of the world’s largest and most important organizations have GHG reduction targets that they are invested in yet struggling to meet. How can we accelerate meeting this demand? Transitioning the world from fossil fuel-derived materials requires meeting customer needs for price, performance, and sustainability. Checkerspot’s vertically integrated innovation platform is designed to address these through molecular biology, material science and polymer chemistry, fabrication and formulation, and consumer engagement. With each ingredient and material we commercialize, we are showing the world that performance vs sustainability is a false choice
10:30-11:00 AM: "Vertical Integration for Sustainable Consumer Chemicals"
Rebecca Lennen, Director of Strain Engineering, Lygos
Lygos is a leading innovator in developing and commercializing technologies for the manufacturing of bio-advantaged chemicals and polymers, replacing environmentally harmful and expensive petrochemical processes with cost-competitive and sustainable biological processes. Lygos uses yeasts and bacteria to fermentatively produce organic acids and other building blocks that serve as platform chemicals for conversion into other products. For example, malonic acid and its dimethyl and diethyl esters (EcoteriaTM) are high-performance, versatile chemicals used in the production of a variety of novel industrial and consumer products including biopolymers, industrial coatings, flavors, fragrances and pharmaceuticals. Recently we have expanded upon our technology for production of aspartic acid, an intermediate for production of polyaspartic acids (SoltellusTM) and other valuable derivatives that have application in a wide range of household, industrial, and agricultural applications. Lygos employs a unique vertical integration platform across the entire technology and product development lifecycle, while also collaborating with best-in-class partners across the value chain, to accelerate the development of sustainable solutions.
11:00-11:30 AM: "Making Chemicals from Waste for the Circular Economy"
Derek Greenfield, Founder & President, iMicrobes
A sustainable economy requires both a complete shift to renewable energy and a fundamental restructuring of our supply chains, starting from the upstream raw materials. While we have the technologies we need for the renewable energy transition, building a circular economy requires cost-effectively transforming our society’s variable waste streams into the inputs for our supply chains. Industrial Microbes is building a key technology for the Circular Economy – the ability to use waste feedstocks as the rebuilding blocks of the chemical industry to make biobased, carbon-negative, cost-competitive products.
11:30AM -12:00 PM: "Scaling up biotechnology to make sustainable materials that deliver high performance at low cost"
Ritu Bansal-Mutalik, Sr. Director of Process Development, Zymochem
As time is ticking for the world to come up with solutions to combat climate change, industrial biotechnology for biomaterial applications has a pivotal and unavoidable role to play. Although Biotechnology has seen initial success in being able to disrupt the chemicals and materials world, wide-spread disruption has been elusive. This is mainly because true commercial success requires the right combination of low cost, scalability and performance. Zymohem has cracked the code to enable this starting with designing carbon conserving strains, and then, during the development of fermentation and downstream processes for the products of these microbes, by being razor focused on balancing the techno economic aspects with product specs, as per the target applications. The traditional fermentation and bioprocess technology that catered to mostly only the low-volume high-cost pharmaceutical and industrial enzymes sector up until just a decade ago, is being modified to meet the needs of high-volume low-cost sustainable chemical and materials sectors.
