Imagine making new plastic feedstocks from greenhouse gases. A new way to remove carbon from the atmosphere and capture it within plastic products that we use every day; plastic products that do not consume the World’s valuable and ever diminishing petroleum reserves.

Newlight Technologies claims to have achieved this using a novel biocatalyst to create advanced-performance grade resins, including resins that can supplant otherwise non-sustainable grades of polypropylene, polyethylene, ABS, and TPU and at a lower cost than current alternatives.

Newlight has developed a resin functionalization technology that enables the company to produce PHA-based plastics that can match or exceed the performance of commodity plastics using air and greenhouse gases, such as methane and carbon dioxide for feedstock.

PHAs are semi-crystalline thermoplastic polyesters that are fully biodegradable in anaerobic and aerobic conditions. Traditionally they are linear polyesters produced in nature by bacterial fermentation of sugar or lipids. They can be either thermoplastic or elastomeric materials, with melting points ranging from 40 to 180 °C.

Newlight Technologies has invented, patented, and commercialized a game-changing carbon capture and plastics manufacturing technology. The company is already operating on a large-scale, continuous basis, and is in fact already selling its plastics to customers.

KI has been working with Newlight Technologies on using the PHA materials in their furniture products.  KI's Strive nesting chair range incorporates the AirCarbon™ material in the manufacture of the chair's backrest.

Get in touch with us if you are interested in seeing how this material might be an option for your product.

Computer Packaging

Dell’s new packaging will launch in the autumn 2014 and is based on carbon-negative AirCarbon™ material from Newlight Technologies and is greener and less expensive to manufacture than oil-based plastic packaging.

The packaging will be used first for sleeves around new Dell Latitude series notebooks and will be piloted in the US with plans to extend it globally for use in both packaging and products.

iPhone cases

Sprint announced in May 2014 that it will be one of the first companies to use AirCarbon™, a new carbon-negative material made from greenhouse gas, instead of petroleum, to create plastic products. The material will be used in black and pink cell phone cases for the iPhone® 5 and iPhone®. Sprint is the first telecommunications company in the world to launch a carbon-negative product using AirCarbon™. The material, AirCarbon™, is manufactured by California-based Newlight Technologies.

“We are pleased to introduce this new technology – essentially turning greenhouse gas into a plastic that has the potential to replace petroleum-based plastics,” said David Owens, Sprint’s senior vice president of Product. “This innovation is another example of Sprint’s leadership in providing eco-friendly products to our customers.”