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Using crop waste to develop biobased plastics

A southwest-Indiana based bioplastics company plans to use food waste from local farmers to create a fully biodegradable plastic. Brian Southern, founder and CEO of AgroRenew says there are no chemicals and no petroleum-based elements in their bioplastics. “It is actually, truly a 100% biodegradable product,” he says. “It can dissolve and degrade in in the soil or other settings.”

Southern says AgroRenew’s bioplastics will fully break down in soil after just six months.

He tells Brownfield the company will source local watermelon, cantaloupe, and pumpkins that don’t make it into the food supply chain. “We’re making a biobased PLA and a starch-based plastic,” he says. “What’s really nice with the rinds is there’s a good starch content, there’s pectin, there’s cellulose space. So those are chemical properties that we can utilize in our overall formula.”

Southern says produce farmers can have up to 50 percent crop waste on their operations. “We’re providing an opportunity for those farmers to actually take that food crop waste, deal with it in a sustainable manner,” he says.  “It’s coming to us, we’re paying them for that food waste, that crop harvest and we’re then utilizing it in a way that makes a full circle where the plastic that we produce can then actually go back into the soil and fully degrade.”

He says the initial target crops are watermelon, cantaloupe, and pumpkin waste totaling more than 100 million pounds each season.

AgroRenew broke ground on their facility in Knox, County Indiana in June and expects to be up and running – testing production lines in early 2025.

AUDIO: Brian Southern, AgroRenew