Green Science Alliance develops plant, UV light curable hard coat material

Environmental problems caused by the population explosion such as global warming, natural resource depletion, water shortage and plastic pollution are getting severe in the world.

One of the reasons for global warming is said to be carbon dioxide (CO2). Compared to petroleum derived chemical products, nature biomass derived chemical products can be considered as carbon neutral because plant absorbs CO2 during their growth and total CO2 emission will be 0 after they degrade after usage. Therefore, developing biomass derived chemical products is one method to reduce CO2 consumption in order to suppress global warming.

The vision of Green Science Alliance is to offer actual cutting-edge technology for sustainable, carbon neutral society. More precisely, those technologies are next generation rechargeable battery, fuel cell, CO2 photo conversion to chemical energy (the process called artificial photosynthesis). Some of Green Science Alliance technologies are registered by the United Nation Organisation (UNIDO's platform "STePP", WIPO GREEN) and they were also selected as a startup company supported by incubation programme of UNOPS GIC Japan in 2020.

Green Science Alliance is also trying to replace all the petrochemical derived chemical products with natural biomass derived one. Those are 100 percent natural biomass biodegradable plastic, biomass resin, biomass coating, biomass colour ink etc.

This time, they developed biomass derived UV curable hard coat material. Namely, part of raw material comes from plants such as corns, soybeans etc.

UV curable hard coat materials are coating material which can be solidified by irradiating UV light, and they have been applied to the surface of liquid crystal related devices, optical films, various type of displays, smartphone, personal computer, automotive parts etc.

They are environmentally friendly products because they do not have liquid evaporation problem after they are coated, compared to water, organic solvent-based coating material. In addition, they can reduce the solvent consumption because all of component can be solidified under UV light irradiation without any waste solvent.

So far, UV curable hard coat materials are made of petroleum in general. This time, they developed the one with 25 – 35 percent of biomass content. Green Science Alliance will keep challenging to create UV curable hard coat materials with higher biomass content.

They are also planning to create biomass derived UV curable adhesive, colour ink etc in the near future.

Green Science Alliance will expand their biomass UV curable coating material business to Japan and the world market.