In the world’s largest biopolymers initiative to date, Dow Chemical and Japanese company Mitsui have formed a new joint venture to provide ‘innovative and sustainable product solutions’ to the global flexible packaging, hygiene and medical markets.
Mitsui will become a 50% partner in Dow’s sugar cane growing operation in Brazil, where construction of a new sugar cane-to-ethanol production facility in Santa Vitória is expected to commence in the third quarter of 2011. This will bring new, biomass-based feedstocks to Dow while diversifying the company’s raw material streams from traditional fossil fuels.
When complete, Dow and Mitsui will have the world’s largest integrated facility for the production of biopolymers made from renewable, sugar cane-derived ethanol. It will be back-integrated into renewable sugar cane, enabling environmentally sustainable production of high performance plastics with a reduced carbon footprint.