Purac joins BE-Basic consortium for bio-based economy

Purac, a CSM company, signed on 18 February 2010 a research contract to participate in the research program of BE-Basic; a consortium of international knowledge institutes, the Dutch government, global industry and financial partners. The research programme aims at developing an economy based on renewable resources. Purac is a partner in this consortium as it develops new sustainable building blocks for the chemical industry.

Purac already has some important initiatives in this area such as lactides for poly lactic acid (PLA) and succinic acid. This initiative will also speed up the company’s programme to use alternative biomass such as agricultural byproducts instead of sugars, glucose and tapioca starch as substrates for its fermentation processes.

The Technical University of Delft, the Netherlands, is coordinating the initiative that includes, among others, an R&D budget exceeding EUR 120 million, of which EUR 60 million is made available by the Dutch Ministries of Finance and Economic Affairs. In this programme, BE-Basic also plans for a multi-purpose bioprocess facility for scale-up research, suited to both current and future technologies.