Timeplast Vs Danimer Scientific (Part 1)
Dear all,
Today, a Danimer Scientific's investor named David Schaffer asked a great question in our campaign page, and I believe it's important for all of you to also know how Timeplast compares to its main U.S. competitor.
Danimer Scientific's most important plastic is PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoates), and based on this plastic, we will elaborate on 3 major disadvantages that Danimer has when compared to Timeplast.
1. Danimer Scientific, not a true innovator
2. Manufacturing cost / Plastic’s price point / Scalability
3. Vision / Approach to sustainability
We will be posting 3 separate updates addressing each point, so please stay tuned!
Here's David's question:
"Just curious. I've been an investor in Danimer Scientific for a few years. Danimer seem to be a direct competitor with existing customer relationships and rapidly scalable production. They seem well ahead of you. How does your product compare to theirs visa vis cost per unit. How much will it cost you to build a facility that is capable of producing 100mm tons/year of output?"
Timeplast's answer (Part 1):
Danimer Scientific is a well known company offering bio-based alternatives and we are inspired by their noble approach to aiding in the fight against Plastic Pollution. Personally, I love some of their patented chemical approaches. We're happy and supportive of their success in being a publicly traded company. The plastic market is so extremely large ($593 billion) as you may know, which makes it necessary to have many players in the space if we hope to tackle this monumental challenge. I have nothing but respect for Danimer Scientific.
Having said that, they are not ahead of Timeplast in technological terms as you mentioned. On the contrary, our tech is at least three generations ahead of their most advanced product; please allow me to elaborate:
Timeplast’s chemical pathways, manufacturing techniques, end-of-life engineering, polymerization efficiency and versatility, carbon footprint, and even the overall vision of the Plastic Pollution issue in comparison with Danimer’s are so innovative, that they represent a never seen before portfolio of products and engineering solutions.
Danimer is in fact ahead us in terms of funding status: they had raised $220M by 2020, we're only in the <$1M range total raised.
1. Danimer Scientific, not a true innovator:
As far back as 1925, Lemoigne discovered PHB plastic, which is a poly(hydroxyalkanoate) material, a biodegradable plastic produced by microorganisms. It was found that several other bacterial strains could also produce PHB, just what Danimer has. In my professional opinion, there is almost no innovation in Danimer Scientific's PHA, specially when compared with Lemoigne 1925's polymer, since it represents an almost perfect by-the-book molecular match.
Timeplast on the other hand, uses a polymer array so innovative that its type of chemistry used has started to appear only recently in a study published in Nature Chemistry Journal, where Peter Christensen and colleagues discovered how to make a new plastic which could be fully broken down and then fully repolymerized in a single heating cycle respectively, using a PDK poly(ketoenamine)s innovative pathway. This process is so pioneering that it was labeled as the “$2.5 trillion Holy Grail of Plastics”. All of this at a time where Timeplast had already been working for 15 years on the same hyper-complex chemical problem, and having patented a very similar approach but with a commercially available plastic, instead of a laboratory specimen like Christensen, since we managed to further innovate in the depolymerization and repolymerization mechanisms to the point we could replicate this pathway in many different types of polymers.
To be continued...
