Breaking Fossil Domination in Plastics: CleanTech Talk Interview with Lignin Industries CEO Fredrik Malmfors

7 minutes ago Scott Cooney 0 Comments




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I really enjoyed sitting down with Fredrik Malmfors, CEO of Lignin Industries, to talk about how his company and its patented technology are taking on fossil based plastics, leveraging good old fashioned horse sense, supply chains, waste materials, and … carbon sequestration technologies? As it turns out, Sweden-based Lignin Industries is a lot of things that are beneficial to the world.

We get pitched A LOT to get people onto the CleanTech Talk podcast — CleanTechnica sometimes receives 200 pitches in a day to cover one story or another, and, increasingly, this comes in the form of podcast guest pitches. Sorting through these and deciding what’s exciting is a f**king job in itself. But I chose this one because of how sensible, practical, useful, and helpful it was, and also because Malmfors said, in another article, “we need to break through the fossil domination of the plastics industry.”

The technology is based in lignin, as you might guess from the company name. Lignin is one of the world’s most common organic compounds, right up there with cellulose (the stuff that is structural and hard to digest in many plant fibers), and chitin (the stuff that makes bug exoskeletons, which tells you a thing or two about how many bugs there are in the world).

Lignin Industries uses this prevalent biomaterial, mixed in its patented process with bio-based oils to create Renol, its product, which can be used as a drop-in replacement for many otherwise fossil-based plastic additives. It has similar characteristics as polyethylene, polypropylene, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). The differences? It’s made from biological materials, it’s biodegradable, and it’s carbon negative (in a cradle-to-gate Life Cycle Analysis).

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Scott Cooney

Scott Cooney (LinkedIn) is a serial eco-entrepreneur focused on making the world a better place for all its residents. Scott is the founder of CleanTechnica and was just smart enough to hire someone smarter than him to run it. He then started Pono Home, a service that greens homes, which has performed efficiency retrofits on more than 20,000 homes and small businesses, reducing carbon pollution by more than 27 million pounds a year and saving customers more than $6.3 million a year on their utilities. Scott wanted to contribute to native ownership of the clean energy revolution, so he gifted Pono Home to a long tenured employee with native Hawaiian roots for just the liquidation value, turning down a mainland company interested in purchasing the company. In a previous life, Scott was an adjunct professor of Sustainability in the MBA program at the University of Hawai'i, a consultant at Saatchi & Saatchi S, where he worked with a team to educate and empower millions of employees to live healthier and more sustainably. He is the author of Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur (McGraw-Hill) , and Green Living Ideas. Scott is an occasional investor, currently he has investments in Rivian (RIVN).

Scott Cooney has 167 posts and counting. See all posts by Scott Cooney