Last week, we spoke about two of the three major ingredients used to make Lastic Bamboo Resin.
The first ingredient is bio-based PBS resin, a purely biodegradable resin made in Thailand by a joint venture between Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi and a local Thai company, PTT Global. If you remembered that PBS stood for the difficult-to-remember polybutylene succinate, you deserve a cookie served on a Lastic-made plate.
The second ingredient is starch, extracted from Taiwan-grown root vegetables like sweet potato and taro. In a nutshell, starch serves as an adhesive, binding bamboo, the third ingredient that we’ll discuss in detail today, to the bio-based PBS.
When it comes to Lastic Bamboo Resin’s properties, many potential clients usually ask two questions: Why make a bio-based compound resin when there’s already one on the market? So why did Lastic’s founders and engineering team use compound bamboo as a compounding agent?
Aside from the Thai-made bio-PBS, the market offers scant choices for a purely biodegradable plastic substitute—most of these resins aren’t even compostable. And one of the main barriers to using bio-based PBS as a plastic substitute is pricing: one ton of bio-PBS costs well over $10,000.00. Compare this to polypropylene (PP), the petroleum-based plastic choice for many straw and plastic cutlery makers. A metric ton of PP currently trades at about 22% of bio-PBS’s cost. Even PLA (polylactic acid), a polymer that many claim to be biodegradable (but isn’t biodegradable), sells for under the cost of bio-PBS.
The founders of Lastic wanted to invent their own compostable/biodegradable compound resin and sell it at competitive prices. Bamboo, endemic and abundant in the island nation of Taiwan, presented an attractive compounding-agent option.
Bamboo is also one of the world’s fastest-growing organisms—a bamboo plant reaches full maturity in just three years, making it easy to plan harvests. Additionally, because bamboo grows naturally in Taiwanese soil, maintaining bamboo farms doesn’t require high levels of fertilizer and water inputs—bamboo groves can just grow on the Taiwanese mountainsides. Finally, bamboo is a highly effective carbon sink, meaning bamboo plants also remove a certain amount of CO2 from the air.
Possessing a quick maturity time, requiring minimal inputs, and serving as a solid carbon sink make bamboo the prime candidate for Lastic. After harvest, Lastic shreds and dries the bamboo stalks, readying them for Lastic’s proprietary-compounding process, where it’s combined with bio-PBS. The result: Lastic Bamboo Resin.
Lastic Bamboo Resin sells at a much lower cost than bio-based PBS and has many applications, including straws, forks, knives, food boxes, cups, and lids. And it’s certified to decompose into the soil in no longer than 253 days. That’s about 3% of the time it takes for PP to decompose. But unlike PP, Lastic Bamboo Resin doesn’t leech toxins into the environment when it decomposes.
Thus, Lastic Bamboo Resin is the superior choice for extrusion, vacuum pressing, and injection molding applications like straws, cutlery, and food boxes!
Comments