Cellugy & circular economy

January 16, 2019
Cellugy's Newsletter: Leveraging the power of biocellulose

Companies explain success in different ways. They have different values and believes that enable dreams to become reality. It takes time to achieve purposeful outcome and this time demands for sustainable actions. You might know now that Sustainability is a necessary buzz concept. Breaking it down would mean considering initiatives that strive for economical superiority, social impact and environmental awareness. These three pillars have a different maturity level in companies, depending on the company stage in the market. For a stronger competitive advantage and for an easier relatedness to the company, startups find the social and environmental initiatives very suitable for a compelling dream. Meanwhile, the economical way through the business model is what gives life to the dream.

Let us seehow Cellugy has leveraged sustainability to protect both planet and food!

Packaging makes a difference in thefood supply chain and it facilitates the safe transit and storage of the food,thus ensuring certain quality standards and preventing food waste. However, thecase of plastic packaging has been “hashtag-ed” among growing concerns of wasteand unnecessary resource use. Besides the environmental harm, the way plasticsare currently produced, used and discarded in most cases fails to capture theeconomic benefits of a more circular approach. 15 million tons of plastic wasteis contributed by packaging in Europe each year and current initiatives tohandling plastic, such as collection schemes or modern recycling methods, haveshown some effectiveness in reducing the amount of plastic mounted into theenvironment, but they fail to tackle the core problem: The material itself. InCellugy, we decided to take action and use our knowledge to develop a 100%bio-based material.

How doesCellugy contribute to an Environmental Win through Circular Economy?

Circular Economy (CE) is currentlypromoted by several businesses around the world, national governments, and EU,in case of Europe based initiatives. Mostly practitioners as representatives ofthese institutions emphasize CE as material reuse, product-remanufacturing,component upgrading and so on. Cellugy’sbiomaterial has a unique feature: It uses locally sourced raw material byoptimizing fruit surplus and its waste from local farmers in Denmark. Anyplant that contain sugar, can be used from us to pursue a packaging with thesame features as conventional plastics (i.e. transparent, flexible andresistant to temperature & water), but harmless to the environment. Ifcompared to oil-based plastics, the carbon footprint and energy consumptionthrough Cellugy’s material can be reduced up to 60-80 %. Earth has limitedassimilative capacity and thus products, components and materials should bekept at their highest utility. Finally, Cellugy’sbiomaterial is home compostable: you can simply throw our packaging away inyour ordinary compost heap or organic waste bin; it will disintegrate and breakdown to fertile compost even at room temperature. We ensure an effectiveafter-use economy with our material disposed properly.

Next forCellugy: Social and Economical WinLong story short – we aimin enhancing the society’s sense of community, cooperation and participationthrough circular economy, though the gain for the social aspect is relativelyimplicit. Lastly – we hope that our responsible and green business image willfacilitate the opening of new markets in reducing waste management costs.