Project
Market Study PHA Materials – Roadmap to applications
This study aims to pinpoint the market opportunities for PHA’s by analyzing the production technology, types of feedstocks used, the material properties, and the environmental footprint of PHA materials.
This study is a joint undertaking by Wageningen Food & Biobased Research and Invest-NL. The objective of the study is to give an overview of the current state of the art of the development (production, extraction and feedstock use) of PHA materials and its potential to be used in a variety of application markets. This information will then be translated into an application roadmap that will indicate which market sectors should be targeted by PHA producers in the near ánd distant future. In order to do so, the current PHA market and its position within the biobased and biodegradable plastics sector will be described.
As a starting point it was found that the family of PHA materials differs from both fossil- and other biobased materials in many ways, which makes it very complex to map the market potential of PHA materials in general. The approach of this study was therefore to select five grades of PHA’s that are all substantially different in composition and thereby represent a wide range of different material properties that can be obtained by PHA materials. In this way a comprehensive overview of the market potential of PHA materials will be given.