Breaking: Edison Agrosciences lands fresh funds to make natural rubber from sunflower crops

• US-based biomaterials developer Edison Agrosciences has raised $600,000 in seed financing to advance its work in creating sunflower crops for rubber manufacturing.
• St. Louis, Missouri-based BioGenerator participated together with the Missouri Technology Corporation (MTC), Crisp &
  Firm, LLC and others.
• Edison Agrosciences will use the funds to scale up operations of rubber manufacturing and additional construct out its seed breeding program.
• The corporate has added longtime rubber business veteran Tom Marsh to its board of administrators.

Whereas the scary “rubber apocalypse” of Covid-era provide chain disruptions has handed, there stays a really actual want for various sources of pure rubber in america and different nations.

The founders of Edison Agrosciences “knew there was a possible challenge with the provision chain of pure rubber,” says firm CEO David Woodburn.

Roughly 90% of all pure rubber is grown in Southeast Asia. “Each a kind of bushes is a clone of seeds exported out of South America within the nineteenth century. And each a kind of bushes is prone to a illness referred to as South American leaf blight.”

A fungal illness, SALB has traditionally been confined to South and Central America (the place it obliterated rubber production in Brazil). According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “The necessity to develop quarantine measures towards the illness is pressing,” as artificial fungicides have “failed to forestall giant scale losses and dieback of bushes.”

Pure rubber is is utilized in every little thing from tires and private protecting gear to shoe soles and seal rings. Due to its excessive tensile (the quantity of stress it will probably stand up to earlier than breaking) and resistance to tears and warmth, it’s sometimes considered as superior to artificial rubber made by way of petroleum-derived hydrocarbons. For some high-performance objects, like airline tires, pure rubber is the one alternative.

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Seed breeding for rubber

Edison Agrosciences is utilizing sunflowers as a supply for pure rubber. The corporate initially dabbled in genetic modification to extend rubber content material in vegetation however has since moved away from that strategy in direction of breeding.

“We’ve confirmed out that the rubber accumulation is definitely influenced by genetics, which signifies that we will breed for it,” says Woodburn.

Sunflowers, whose leaves naturally include 1 – 2% of their weight in pure rubber, are already grown on about 1 million acres in america, and lots of extra worldwide. There are, he says, “shock ranges of rubber, each on the excessive finish and low finish throughout completely different varieties.”

“Farmers know tips on how to develop it, there’s a seed business round it, there’s crop safety in place. So the issue grew to become tips on how to produce extra rubber within the sunflower as a substitute of tips on how to get growers to undertake one thing new.”

An ‘extraordinarily lean and capital environment friendly’ firm

The brand new funding will partly assist scale operations. This may allow Edison to provide the portions of rubber wanted to work with business companions in addition to conduct bodily and mechanical testing.

Funding can even assist additional growth of Edison’s breeding program.

“We proceed to run range trials, exploratory trials, to search out new genetic traces for sunflower and enter that data into the mannequin. Then we make these crosses and proceed growth of these to get larger and better ranges of rubber [in the sunflower plants].”

Woodburn says that whereas $600,000 wouldn’t be a lot for some firms, “we’ve structured Edison Agrosciences to be extraordinarily lean and capital environment friendly,” including that they’ve run the corporate for the final 4 years on roughly $100,000 in investor fairness.

Earlier funding has come from the US Division of Protection and the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator. The $600,000 shut of this spherical was larger than the corporate was really focusing on.

“It’s not a giant quantity for many firms. For us. It really goes an extended methods.”

The funding coincides with the appointment of rubber business veteran Tom Marsh to Edison’s Board of Administrators. Marsh has held numerous government roles in firms inside the rubber provide chain.

“He’s mainly spent his complete his complete profession within the rubber business,” says Woodburn, who provides that March is “recognized for being enthusiastic about ‘onshoring’ the provision of pure rubber.”

Assembly demand for sustainable rubber

The most important problem in the mean time for the corporate is producing demand for a product that primarily solves a future want, not a present one.

“The South American leaf blight hasn’t hit Southeast Asia but, so it’s not an issue at this time,” says Woodburn. “For probably the most half, there’s loads of rubber obtainable, however the business undoubtedly acknowledges is that [the blight is] a severe, significant issue.”

All the identical, an organization fixing for tomorrow, with out a direct market, often winds up on the shelf, he says. To keep away from that, Edison Agrosciences is focusing on “extra specialty purposes which have larger pricing and are clearly decrease quantity” earlier than finally shifting on to commodity rubber.

On the demand entrance, the corporate’s sustainability angle could assist. Pure rubber from Southeast Asia and different tropical climates comes with deforestation points. Artificial rubber derived from petrochemicals is related to energy-intensive processes and unsafe waste streams.

In the meantime, firms utilizing rubber (e.g., tire firms) have the identical formidable public climate commitments as these in different industries. Woodburn says main tire firms like Michelin and Goodyear have pledges to make their tires from sustainable supplies and processes by 2050.

“There’s all types of stuff blended into rubber, particularly in tires. There are some compounds that really aren’t so nice. What we might be capable of do is change a few of these with sunflower rubber.”

Within the footwear business, for instance, firms can afford to make a shoe sole out of pure rubber. “However there’s the opposite stuff that’s blended in that retains them from saying it’s utterly sustainable shoe. We could possibly assist them out by changing a few of these artificial supplies.”

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