Every year over 2.3 million tonnes of microplastics are intentionally added to a wide range of products, such as paints, cosmetics, packaging, vaccine manufacturing, and biocatalysis. These plastic microbeads have increasingly been found in animals, plants, and in humans. Their presence in tissue, heart, brain, placenta, and in new born babies represent serious potential adverse health effects. Naturbeads aim to replace fossil fuel-based primary microplastics with biodegradable microspheres made from cellulose, the material trees are made of.
Nature beads’ manufacturing process uses an innovative combination of solvents and process technology (based on membrane emulsification). This processes cellulose, naturally found in fibre form, into spherical particles. It does this without altering celluloses chemistry so retaining its high mechanical and chemical stability as well its biodegradability. The process is continuous, with full recycling of all solvents used, and allows control of microsphere size, size distribution, and porosity.
Professor Davide Mattia is the CTO of the company, responsible for all R&D and manufacturing. I am in charge of our manufacturing scale-up efforts, leading the design and construction of our first commercial manufacturing plant, scheduled to start producing in 2025.
Coming from a technical and academic background, he is very interested in learning more about business strategy, financial planning, sales, and customer relations. He identifies the Shott Scale-Up Accelerator’s coaching support as a way to improve his leadership skills.
Naturbeads have just closed a major series-A funding round which will take the company from a Research and Development start-up to a manufacturing company. Davide identifies that the Shott Scale-Up Accelerator supports “Sharing experiences with colleagues on a similar path and learning about finance, leadership and business strategy will help me support my company in our ambitious journey.”
He sees Naturbeads’ next step is to design and build their first commercial plant in 2025 and start selling their product at scale to clients while continuing to innovate. From this base they also plan to target the EU and Japanese markets.
