In June, the domestic bio-based material market didn’t witness obvious fluctuations. Many enterprises began to seek for new fields like toys and plastics to expand the application of bio-based materials, indicating that the enterprises partly depended on application expansion to push forward the development of bio-based materials.
In this issue, CCM had in-depth interviews with Zhong Luhua, chairman of Shenzhen Ecomann, and Liu Minying, professor from Zhengzhou University, to discuss about PHA and bio-based PA respectively.
Regarding the PHA market in China, Zhong believed that PHA as natural polyester synthesized by several bacteria, presents superior biological performance with wider application, compared with other bio-based materials like PLA and PBS. However, the PHA industry in China has not established a complete value chain or formed an economy of scale, resulting in its higher cost and lower acceptance in the domestic market. In the following stage, Shenzhen Ecomann will resort to PHA films to step by step open the potential application market like mobile phone cover.
Professor Liu focused on the current situation and the perspective of the bio-based PA industry. He stated that PA itself is an amazing material that can be applied in many fields. Currently, the mainstream PA in the market is petro-based PA. Comparatively, since the production cost of bio-based PA prepared by fermentation of castor oil or glucose is still too high, bio-based PA will not completely substitute petro-based PA in the near future. However, with the exhaustion of petroleum resources and the severe environmental problems caused by carbon emissions, bio-based material boasts great potential. It is predicted that the future development of bio-based PA still faces a lot of challenges.
Besides, CCM also paid attention to the prices of upstream raw materials, like corn starch and dry cassava. Similarly, the two raw materials saw seasonal price increases due to the summer heat. However, the price increase of corn starch was attributed to price increase of corn and the manmade price increases of corn starch by manufacturers to reduce losses. Meanwhile, the price increase of dry cassava was partly due to its import decrease. Also, CCM predicted that the prices of two raw materials would continue to increase in a short period.
The RMB/USD exchange rate in this issue is USD1.00=RMB6.1710 on 3 June, 2014, sourced from the People's Bank of China.
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