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Zhongguancun Dahe Capital North America Investment Project and CAMP3.0 Project Genecis won the championship of “Social Enterprise Exhibition and Entrepreneurship Competition” at the Discovery 2018 Exhibition.

At the beginning of May, the most important Canadian innovation achievement exhibition OCE’s Discovery 2018 was held in Toronto. This Canada’s premier innovation exhibition brings together the best people in the industry, academia, investment and government to show cutting-edge technologies and best practices in the fields of energy, financial technology, clean technology, environment, health care, digital media, information and communication technology.

Zhongguancun Dahe Capital North America invested enterprise and CAMP3.0 enterprise Genecis won the championship of “Social Enterprise Exhibition and Entrepreneurship Competition” at the Discovery 2018 exhibition.

It is understood that the “Social Enterprise Exhibition and Entrepreneurship Competition” is jointly held by the Ministry of Economic Development and Growth of Ontario and the Ontario Center of Excellence. It aims to provide enterprises with a more intuitive display channel, attract potential investors, and increase the attention of the society on social enterprises or enterprises with broad public welfare values, thus further improving the investment ecology of related industries and promoting the steady development of the industry.

The winner of the competition will receive a total reward of $20000, including a cash reward of $10000 provided by the Ontario Department of Economic Development and Growth and a special legal aid subsidy of $10000 provided by Norton Rose Fulbright Law Firm.

In 2017, the world’s food worth more than 1 trillion dollars was wasted. In addition to a small part of these foods being used for composting and biogas production, about 95% of them directly enter the landfill, which not only occupies a large amount of valuable land resources, but also releases 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions during food degradation.

Founded in 2016, Genecis is committed to exploring food waste treatment methods with both economic and environmental benefits. The company has developed a set of complete and efficient biological agent food waste recycling technology, which can transform food waste into raw materials with higher value, such as PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate) bioplastics and fertilizer.

“We turned the food waste discarded by the restaurant every day into bio plastic products.” Luna Yu, founder of Genecis, said.

Genecis’s proprietary treatment process is precisely applied to some special functions of microorganisms in garbage treatment. Genecis uses some special kinds of bacteria in its two-stage process of transforming food waste into bioplastics. In the first process, a bacterium decomposes food waste into liquid volatile fatty acids (VFA), while the undigested solid part can be used as compost to produce fertilizer; Volatile fatty acids enter the second process, and another kind of bacteria intervenes to continue decomposition and form a particle called polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) in the cell. PHA granules can be collected by simply decomposing such cells.

PHA is a kind of completely degradable bioplastics, which is a research hotspot of biological functional materials in recent years. As an environment-friendly plastic, it is different from other degradable plastics that require certain conditions to degrade, but can be directly decomposed into carbon dioxide and water by microorganisms in the natural environment. In addition, PHA also has many adjustable material properties, which can be as hard as engineering plastics or as soft as rubber, so it has a wide range of application scenarios in many fields and has high economic value.

But cost is a big problem that limits its wide application. At present, the main raw materials for PHA production are sugarcane and corn, and the purchase cost accounts for almost half of the PHA production cost. If PHA can be continuously extracted from food waste, its cost will be greatly reduced.

Previously, Genecis had completed a small test of a 60 liter bioreactor at the University of Toronto. The results showed that for every 30 pounds of food waste, 1 pound of PHA granules and 8 pounds of fertilizer could be obtained. Next, the company will enter the test of 1000 liter reactor, and then start to establish its own experimental plant. Genecis has started to deal with food waste in cooperation with some large catering institutions.

In Toronto, a large restaurant needs to pay 15000 Canadian dollars a year to the garbage disposal company to dispose of food waste. Genecis charges these restaurants a cleaning fee of 15% below the market price. Since there is no need to spend extra money on landfilling, Genecis can get income from this part of the cleaning fee.

Then these food wastes are used as raw materials to produce PHA granules and fertilizers, bringing another source of income to the company. Since the price of PHA particles is more than 5 times that of ordinary plastic particles, this will also be a major revenue component of Genecis in the future.

“Our ultimate goal is to enable cooperative restaurants to enjoy the economic and environmental benefits brought about by technological change. By optimizing our processes to produce higher value products, we can improve product sales profits while reducing the fees charged to restaurants.” Luna said.

Genecis will face a huge market. Relevant data shows that the PHA market is expected to reach 30 billion Canadian dollars by 2020. With the improvement of environmental requirements in North America, some policies also provide opportunities for the rapid development of Genecis. For example, more than 20 cities in North America have issued bans on organic waste landfill.

Industries that produce a large amount of organic waste, such as restaurants, will face additional fines if they cannot reduce the output of organic waste. Genecis undoubtedly provides them with an economic and green solution.

“In the next five years, our cooperative restaurants will reach 2000, and the value of each ton of chemicals alone will exceed 4000 Canadian dollars/ton.”