Origin Materials celebrated the start-up of its new, state-of-the-art plant on Wednesday.
Local dignitaries joined company representatives for a ribbon cutting ceremony at Origin 1, which officially started-up at the end of June.
Co-Founder and Co-CEO John Bissell said it's the world’s first commercial CMF [chloromethyl furfural] plant.
"We've handed off the whole plant to operations and manufacturing, we haven't started producing product off of it yet, but we are very, very close," said Bissell.
The new plant will supply industry with intermediate chemicals and materials that can be used in everything from clothing and textiles, to plastics, packaging, fuels and car parts.
"We think of this as the most green kind of [industrial] plant you could possibly imagine that's realistic. So, yeah, this is as green as green gets," Bissell added.
Origin 1 is located within the ARLANXEO site, at 1265 Vidal Street South, utilizing a lot of its services.
"You really want to do all of the parts that are critical and differentiated for your technology, and none of the parts that are not," he said. "What that often means is, you want to have steam, electricity, waste water treatment, boiler feed water... all of that kind of stuff. You want that to be done by somebody besides yourself, if you possibly can, and ARLANXEO was a great place for that. It was somewhat unique for this scale of plant."
Bioindustrial Innovation Canada [BIC] Executive Director Sandy Marshall said they've been working with Origin Materials for over a decade to get to this point.
"We quickly recognized the incredible potential of Origin's technology to fundamentally impact society's demand for fossil fuel based feedstocks, by leveraging biomass to produce foundational chemicals making carbon negative products needed for today's world," said Marshall.
He also highlighted Origin Materials' use of local and regional partnerships.
"To integrate into the Sarnia-Lambton Hybrid Chemistry Cluster and take advantage of the region's collaborative and innovative culture, its industrial infrastructure, engineering and skilled trades, and its bio-based feedstocks," Marshall added.
