Bioengineer, Ohio Company Create 'Green' Product, Jobs
Waste is a terrible thing to waste. That’s the mantra guiding an Ohio State researcher and a bioenergy entrepreneur to collaborate on the development of a new, renewable source of polyurethane foam that’s expected to create up to 30 jobs in Mansfield, Ohio, in the next two years.
The product, known as a bio-polyol, is made from crude glycerin, a byproduct of biodiesel production that has so little commercial value it’s practically considered waste. But mixed with other biomass — through a patent-pending process developed by Yebo Li, a biosystems engineer with the university’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) in Wooster, Ohio — this crude glycerin becomes the foundation for making polyurethane foam, which is used in a variety of products in the construction, automotive, appliance and other industries.
Mansfield-based Poly-Green Technologies LLC is a start-up company formed to commercialize Li’s invention. Li’s research on bio-polyols also has received funding from the Ohio Soybean Council and TechColumbus as well as support from PolymerOhio.
“Our goal right now is to be able to produce a product with consistent quality, which is always a challenge when you are working with waste sources,” says Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering. “We have been successful in demonstrating to potential end-users that our foam performs just as well as petroleum-based foam, whether for flexible- or rigid-foam applications.”
In fact, the bio-polyol developed by OARDC — the research arm of the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences — has many advantages over its competitors: It doesn’t take away crops from food production; it can be used at 100 percent to make products such as insulation boards (other bio-polyols need to be blended with petroleum-based polyols to bring up the quality); and the resulting polyurethane foam is 5 to 10 percent cheaper than petroleum-based or natural oil-based foams.
“For every 10 gallons of biodiesel produced, there’s one gallon of crude glycerin left over,” adds Jeff Schultheis, chief operating officer of Poly-Green Technologies. “In 2011, the U.S. biodiesel industry alone will be producing about 70 million gallons of crude glycerin. So there’s a lot of growth potential for this product, and we feel we will be able to enter into the polyurethane market very easily.”
And quickly: Schultheis, 1990 graduate of Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business, expects to enter the market late this summer.
“We feel we could sell 1 million gallons a year for the first two years and 5 million gallons per year by the fifth year,” Schultheis says. “Within the next two years we will go from three employees currently to between 20 and 30 employees, so this will be a very good small business for the Mansfield area that’s desperately needing jobs.”
Mauricio Espinoza is an associate editor at Ohio State’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.
Contact:
Yebo Li, (330) 263-3855, li.851@osu.edu
On the Web: Read more and watch a video about the research and Poly-Green Technologies at go.osu.edu/polyurethane.
