In my last post, I discussed why it is important for bioplastics to penetrate the market of durable applications. I suggested that this was a new step for the industry and I’ve been politely corrected by Todd Rogers, Market Manager- Polyamides at Arkema Inc, who pointed out that Arkema has been commercialising durable bioplastics for nearly 50 years. To amend my mistake and provide me with more info, Mr Rogers and I spend some time discussing Arkema’s Renewable range, the recently created Bioplastics Council and some of the environmental challenges faced by the plastics industry.
Arkema Renewables
Arkema has been producing at commercial scale for more than 40 years a high performance polyamide, PA11, under the tradename of Rilsan®. The fact that Rilsan® is derived from castor oil, a renewable source, has not been a top marketing priority until recently —I don’t think the market place was requesting bioplastics until recently. Most of our customers were and still are...
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Arkema Renewables
Renewable TPEs
Thermoplastic elastomers, or TPEs, deserve a post of their own, as they are an interesting polymeric family that is not very well known. You can find a good introduction in Wikipedia. If you are not familiar with Wikipedia, give it a go, you’ll be surprise how thorough it can be considering is free. Just be careful to check the facts elsewhere afterwards, as anyone can edit an entry and some are almost like corporative pages.
Coming back to the initial issue, TPEs have rubber and thermoplastic properties. This combination of properties is achieved by blends of elastomers and thermoplastics or by using copolymers. Usually elastomers are thermosets and the crosslinking is by a covalent created during vulcanisation. TPEs crosslinked thanks to weaker bonds or by bonds being created in only one of TPE’s phases.
In the previous table you can see types of TPEs commercialised, some companies that produced them and their trade name. Links are at the bottom of the post. Arkema and DuPont...
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