El proyecto en detalle
Nota: este formulario debe ser cumplimentado en su totalidad por las personas que proponen la innovación.
¿Qué problema se ha resuelto?
Plastics manufacturers face a structural gap: the world produces ~414 million tonnes of plastic a year, over 90% of it from virgin fossil feedstock, with only ~9% effectively recycled — yet the "sustainable" alternatives on the market (PLA, starch blends, seaweed-based materials) rely on food crops or specialty fibres, cost 1.5–2× more than commodity plastics, and often underperform on strength, heat resistance, or moisture barrier. Meanwhile, tightening EU regulation (PPWR, microplastics restrictions, extended producer responsibility) is forcing brands and converters to find low-carbon, non-food, recyclable materials — but no scalable option currently combines genuine sustainability, industrial performance, and competitive cost. At the same time, cities generate 20,000–100,000 tonnes of green waste (fallen leaves, grass, branches) annually that is simply landfilled or composted at a cost of €45–70 per tonne, releasing CO₂ and methane instead of being put to productive use. Fibrolitan® addresses both problems at once: it gives industry a non-food, waste-derived thermoplastic that performs like commodity plastic, and gives cities a way to turn a waste-disposal cost into a valuable industrial feedstock.
¿Cómo se resuelve?
Fibrolitan® replaces the physical reinforcement mechanism of traditional bio-composites with a chemical bonding mechanism — which is what allows it to use messy, unsorted, seasonally variable urban waste as a reliable industrial feedstock instead of requiring clean, single-species biomass.
¿En qué se diferencia esta solución?
Fibrolitan®'s key differentiators fall into four areas — feedstock, chemistry, performance, and economics:
1. Feedstock that no competitor uses. Fibrolitan® is the first platform to use mixed, unsorted urban green waste (fallen leaves, grass clippings, small branches) as a thermoplastic filler. Every existing "sustainable" alternative draws on a different, more constrained resource: PLA/PHA/starch blends depend on food-grade crops; wood-plastic composites depend on virgin wood flour already contested by the panelboard and energy sectors; seaweed-based materials depend on farmed or harvested seaweed. Fibrolitan®'s feedstock is non-food, decentralised, low/negative-cost (municipalities currently pay €45–70/tonne to dispose of it), and drawn from infrastructure that already exists (curbside collection, drop-off depots).
2. Molecular bonding instead of physical fibre reinforcement. Conventional natural-fibre composites rely on the length and structural integrity of the fibre itself for mechanical reinforcement — which is why they need species-sorted, cleaned biomass and still suffer from poor fibre–matrix adhesion, moisture uptake and brittleness. Fibrolitan®'s redox-activation process instead generates catechol and quinone functional groups on the biomass surface, which form covalent and π–π stacking bonds directly with the polymer matrix. Because performance comes from surface chemistry rather than fibre quality, the process works reliably on compositionally diverse, unsorted, seasonally variable waste — something no competing process is designed to tolerate.
3. High filler loading with drop-in processability. Fibrolitan® accommodates 40–80 wt% filler loading while remaining fully compatible with standard injection-moulding, extrusion, thermoforming and FDM equipment — no capex, no line redesign. Most bio-based alternatives force a trade-off between filler loading and processability; Fibrolitan®'s interfacial chemistry is designed specifically to avoid that trade-off.
4. Programmable aesthetics as a functional feature, not a side effect. The degree of lignin–tannin activation and compatibiliser choice can be tuned to produce either smooth technical surfaces or natural "leaf-pattern"/wood-like textures — giving brand owners a genuine design and storytelling asset (useful in eyewear, accessories, premium packaging) that commodity fillers like talc or glass fibre cannot offer.
5. Cost trajectory aimed at parity with commodity plastic, not just "less bad." Because the feedstock cost is near-zero (or negative, once municipal savings are counted) and the process eliminates pulping, bleaching and silanisation steps used by competitors, Fibrolitan® targets ≤1.2× the cost of virgin PP at industrial scale — materially closer to cost parity than the 1.5–2× premium typical of PLA, starch blends and seaweed-based materials.
