BASF has officially opened its new Biodegradation and Microplastics Center of Excellence at its site in Wyandotte, Michigan. The new centre includes a biodegradation laboratory, which BASF inaugurated at a ribbon cutting ceremony attended by BASF representatives from across North America within research and business divisions.
BASF said the centre had been established to ‘help customers across North America achieve their circularity and sustainability goals’.
“The Wyandotte site houses a broad range of business, manufacturing and R&D activities within BASF. I’m excited to see the center at the site furthering BASF’s support to our customers and our company’s goals toward a sustainable future,” said Benjamin Knudsen, vice president of Research North America. The Wyandotte site has an interdisciplinary setup, and has a broad R&D portfolio including chemicals, materials, formulations, analytics, and piloting.
The Wyandotte labs are expected to yield valuable information on processes ranging from the disintegration performance of compostable materials to biodegradation performance of novel chemistries, as well as insights into microplastics and the behaviour of plastics through their life cycles.
“By advancing our understanding of current materials and the characterization techniques needed to examine next generation materials, we help pave the way for a more sustainable future,” said Dr. Jeanne Hankett, Leader for the Center of Excellence and the Microplastics Research Liaison for North America.
The biodegradation laboratory will work closely with customers to address the end-of-life performance of their products. It will enable BASF to directly support its customers ‘by accelerating their product development processes with measurable data they would not have had access to in-house’, according to Dr. Jeanette Hanna, Biopolymers Market Development Manager for North America.
The new laboratory will support biodegradable product development primarily in food service and packaging, agriculture, detergents, cleaning, and cosmetics industries. Furthermore, the lab will have the capability to assess rates of disintegration for novel compostable products designed to divert food waste to composting facilities. It is part of a broader network of similar labs at BASF globally.
“For BASF to develop fully biodegradable products for our customers, this requires a fundamental understanding of chemistry and of biological processes combined with digital tools,” said Prof. Andreas Künkel, vice president, Biopolymers Research in Ludwigshafen, Germany. “It is essential to test these products under various framework conditions, which, among others, means, in different environments around the globe.”