Manmade climate change is, without a doubt, the biggest challenge of our age, and rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are the direct cause of the problem. A great deal of political and scientific effort has gone into finding ways to curb such emissions, but with atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases reaching record levels in 2013 and holding steady in 2014, it’s fair to say they’ve yet to be successful. As a problem, it’s proving impossible to solve, but what if it were seen as an opportunity instead? No, I’m not saying that climate change is a good thing, but referring to a company that has chosen to see greenhouse gases as a resource rather than a scourge. Newlight Technologies, founded in 2003 but only in the public eye since 2011, is capturing atmospheric greenhouse gases and using them to create a plastic material called AirCarbon, which it says matches oil-based plastics in performance and out-competes them on price. Mark Herrema, Co-Founder and CEO (pictured, centre, with Evan Creelman, COO, and Kenton Kimmel, Co-Founder and CTO), picks up the tale: “The concept of turning carbon emissions into materials started in 2003 when I read a newspaper article about methane emissions. I was at Princeton, and had decided to go to medical school, but there was something about this article that caught my attention; it described the precise volume of methane emissions from dairy farms, and the tangible nature of this number started a chain of questions: how much methane does a farm produce, a county, a state, a landfill, an energy facility? And then, ultimately: if so many of our materials are made from carbon, why are we letting all of this carbon go into the air? Why can’t we use it as a resource to make things?” Herrema tells me that the science to convert methane into thermoplastic polymers has existed for many decades, but the price – two to three times greater than traditional plastics – has prevented commercialisation. The conversion process occurs through a biocatalyst, and previous biocatalysts were self-limiting, “meaning that they could only make a certain amount of polymer before they would turn themselves off and make carbon dioxide instead”, Herrema explains. Historically, manufacturing one kilogramme of plastic required one kilogramme of biocatalyst, rendering the process economically inefficient. “Our belief from the beginning was that the only way a greenhouse gas-based material could make an impact was if it didn’t cost more than oil-based plastic, so that it could move without subsidies or a premium – and if it could do that, we would have a market-based tool to address climate change.” For nine years, the California-based company “worked in radio-silence – no website, no public presence”, as Herrema, along with Co-Founder and CTO Kenton Kimmel and, later, COO Evan Creelman, focused on developing the technology. Originally operating out of Herrema’s parents’ garage, initial funding came from odd jobs that Herrema and Kimmel picked up after graduating from university: “We both worked hotel jobs (bellhop and valet) to keep things afloat, driving to our lab an hour away at night and coming home in the small hours of the morning”, Herrema explains. “We didn’t have enough money to park close to the lab, so we would park my used, green Saturn about 15 minutes away and skateboard in. During this time, we were building up our laboratory research data, proving various elements of our technology at small scale. Once we had carried out laboratory-scale work for about a year, we raised our first round of capital, and this allowed us to build our first pilot production line.” The key breakthrough, Herrema says, was the development of a biocatalyst that could create nine times more plastic than previous versions: “Our biocatalyst is the engine of our conversion process.We start by producing microorganisms, and we cause those microorganisms to generate a unique bundle of enzymes that have the ability to convert greenhouse gas into polymer at high yield. Our breakthrough was designing the process so that those enzymes are non- self-limiting; that is, unlike other enzymes, they don’t turn themselves off, and will go on producing polymer at a yield that is about nine times higher than previous... The biocatalyst works by pulling oxygen out of air and carbon and hydrogen out of methane, and then combining those molecules into a polymer: it keeps stringing these molecules together to form a long-chain molecule, and that molecule is a thermoplastic polymer, meaning you can melt it and turn it into shapes, just like plastic from oil, but now from captured carbon that would have otherwise become part of the air.” The greenhouse gases, Herrema says, can come from a number of sources – “anywhere that methane would otherwise be vented or flared”. Newlight’s commercial plant uses gas created at a diary farm digester, though the company is working with other farms, landfills and energy sites to set up conversion systems that are remarkably simple compared to traditional plastic- making methods, as Herrema explains: “To make plastic today, polyethylene for instance, you start with a stream of either petrochemical-based oil or natural gas: the first thing you do is separate out the ethane component, which is only a fraction of the overall material stream (the methane component, which is most of the remainder of the material stream in natural gas, is usually combusted, wherein all of that carbon is released to air); next, you convert the ethane fraction into ethylene in a major unit operation; finally you convert the ethylene into polyethylene powder in an organic solvent-based unit operation – all of this at very high pressures and temperatures... “Compare that to the AirCarbon process: one farm, one tank, two inputs – air and methane-based carbon emissions... at ambient operating conditions. No high pressures or temperatures, no toxic solvents, or multiple major unit operations... generating multiples in savings in terms of utilities, capital cost, and of course carbon emissions.” Indeed, compared to oil-based plastics, which have carbon footprints greater than their weight, AirCarbon has been verified by sustainability auditors SCS Global Services and environmental data company Trucost as a carbon negative material. The ultimate goal, Herrema tells me, “is to make AirCarbon a global-scale material to replace oil-based plastics, and we intend to achieve that by out-competing on price and performance”. A critical area that Newlight is focusing on now is recycling. Although AirCarbon is recyclable, and “can be reused multiple times without undue performance loss”, according to Herrema, as it is still a small-volume polymer, “the world does not yet have a global recycling system” to deal with it. He anticipates that this will change as the company grows, and to that end, it is “working closely” with post-consumer recycling organisations. In recent years, at the request of partner companies, he says, they’ve managed to integrate AirCarbon into materials like polypropylene and polyethylene: “By using an alloying process to bind AirCarbon with these materials in a way that maintains or improves the performance of these materials in the recycling process, we are working with recyclers and brands to replace oil with captured carbon while enabling recyclability.” Recyclability, Herrema maintains, is far preferable to biodegradability, a characteristic some biomaterial manufacturers boast about, as “when something biodegrades, it releases its carbon back into the air”, whereas Newlight’s goal has always been to capture that carbon and prevent it getting into the atmosphere in the first place – turning the biggest challenge of our age into one of the biggest opportunities. Watch this space...