DIC Corporation and Debut Biotechnology, Inc. Team Up to Develop and Bio-Manufacture Natural Pigments for More Sustainable Food Colorants and Cosmetics
July 28, 2021 at 03:55 am EDT
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DIC Corporation announced a joint research development agreement with Debut Biotechnology, Inc., further enhancing DIC efforts to develop natural pigments for food colorants and cosmetics. In recent years, increasingly urgent climate concerns have increased global consumer demand for biodegradable, naturally derived colorants—notably in foods and cosmetics—to replace synthetic petroleum-derived colorants. This rapidly increasing consumer demand has motivated major global brands to seek out more sustainable materials for their products. Unfortunately, the increasing efforts to extract useful pigments from natural materials, including flowers or plants, continue to face significant commercialization challenges, including unacceptably low yields, excessive post-extraction waste generation, and environmental burdens, such as land and water use. Moreover, problems specific to agriculture, such as increasingly unstable weather as well as qualitative and quantitative fluctuations remain as barriers to efficient production. Unfortunately, the increasing efforts to extract useful pigments from natural materials, including flowers or plants, continue to face significant commercialization challenges, including unacceptably low yields, excessive post-extraction waste generation, and environmental burdens, such as land and water use. Moreover, problems specific to agriculture, such as increasingly unstable weather as well as qualitative and quantitative fluctuations remain as barriers to efficient production. While more organizations are now researching ways to efficiently culture bacteria, yeast, or algae, etc., using biological reactions within cells to produce needed materials, the by-products generated by these reactions continue to foil attempts to conduct reaction processes under optimum conditions.
DIC Corporation specializes in the manufacturing and marketing of printing inks and chemicals. Net sales break down by product family as follows:
- printing inks (47.2%): offset inks, decorative inks, soft cut inks, etc.;
- polymers (25%): aqueous resins, acrylic resins, saturated polyester resins, UV curable resins, polyurethane resins, epoxy resins, unsaturated polyester resins and polystyrenes;
- fine chemicals products (12.4%): liquid crystals, functional pigments and multi-purpose liquid pigments;
- chemical and thermoplastic components (8.1%): polyphenylene sulfide, liquid inks and dyes for plastics;
- industrial adhesive tapes and hollow fibre membranes (7.3%).
At the end of 2019, the group had 9 production sites in Japan.
Net sales are distributed geographically as follows: Japan (39.5%), Asia and Oceania (20.5%), Europe and Africa (23.1%) and the Americas (16.9%).
DIC Corporation and Debut Biotechnology, Inc. Team Up to Develop and Bio-Manufacture Natural Pigments for More Sustainable Food Colorants and Cosmetics