Novomer is an emerging sustainable chemistry company pioneering a family of high performance, environmentally responsible polymers and chemical intermediates. Novomer’s family of polymer products contain up to half CO2 by weight, and thus both sequester CO2 in the polymer and reduce the petroleum feedstock needed for competing materials. In addition to these environmental benefits, the use of inexpensive CO2 enables competitive pricing and Novomer’s highly selective catalyst enables unique performance characteristics of the finished polymers. This combination of environmental responsibility, high performance and low cost make Novomer polymers commercially attractive in a broad range of applications.
Novomer’s CO2-based polymers are polyethylene carbonate (PEC) and polypropylene carbonate (PPC). These materials can be made to have a broad range of material characteristics, from stiff solid plastics to viscous liquids, based on the molecular weight of the polymer chains. This enables Novomer materials to be used in a number of different applications, including flexible and rigid packaging, coatings resins, and polyurethane foams, all by making a simple adjustment the process used to make the polymer. Novomer’s low molecular weight polyol material has shown equivalent or superior performance attributes compared to coatings with current resins, and is free of BPA. Novomer’s high molecular weight thermoplastic material has excellent stiffness, impact resistance, and oxygen barrier properties that allows it to be used in flexible and rigid consumer packaging applications where these properties are critical.
Novomer has received significant public recognition in recent months. In 2010, Novomer was awarded a $20.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s “Innovative Concepts for the Beneficial Reuse of Carbon Dioxide” program to commercialize its CO2-based polymer technology platform. Novomer was selected one of the Top 50 Most Innovative Companies by MIT in 2011 and one of the Global Cleantech 100 in 2010.