A Renewable Building Block for PUDs and High-Performance Water-Based Uralkyds with High Renewable Content
The finite availability of petro-chemical resources, along with their environmental impact and economic volatility, have long been known to the petro-chemical industry and are more frequently viewed by society and the consumer as unsustainable. Society’s awareness of petro-chemicals’ ecological footprint is growing, along with knowledge that the unchecked use of these materials will result in depletion of the earth’s natural resources and further environmental damage for future generations. This awareness has initiated a movement within the textile, materials and coating industries to produce products in a more sustainable manner. Stahl, a leader in process chemicals for leather and other substrates, recognized this trend early on and developed a wide variety of water-based products using technologies such as high-performance polyurethanes to develop innovative products that meet or exceed customers’ performance expectations and reduce environmental impact. Together with partners such as BioAmber, Stahl is developing new products where the petroleum-based polyols are either fully or partially replaced by renewable countertypes. Using Bio Amber’s biobased succinic acid (SA) (Figure 1) as a key building block of polyester polyols (PEPs), an important group of materials can be formed that enable the creation of polyurethanes (PUs) and polyurethane dispersions (PUDs) for coatings with excellent performance. These can be produced in a sustainable fashion, reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption.
As a platform chemical, biobased succinic acid provides researchers and product developers a sustainable chemical building block to enable innovative development of high-performance products useful in a wide range of applications ranging from personal care products, to non-phthalate plasticizers, to polymeric derivatives used in urethanes, polyesters and alkyd resin technologies.