An innovation that could drastically reduce the volume of harmful plastic microbeads in products ranging from cosmetics to paint is helping a UK cleantech developer win plaudits and attract investment.

Naturbeads, a spinout from University of Bath, has developed a process to manufacture biodegradable microparticles from cellulose. The firm, set up in 2019, is based on technology created to address the potential environmental and health problems resulting from the proliferation of plastic microbeads – also known as microplastics – in a huge range of consumer products and industrial processes.

Microplastics are used for a number of reasons across a variety of industrial sectors: they can act as an exfoliating agent in facewash, for example, and can also create porousness in ceramics, while paint manufacturers use microplastics to act as a binding agent.

However, the leakage of microplastics, especially into marine environments, is thought to cause serious damage to fragile ecosystems. It has been estimated that 30,000 tons of microplastics escape into the world’s oceans every year and it remains unclear exactly what the impact of microplastics in the human food chain might be.

Giovanna Laudisio, co-founder and chief executive of Naturbeads, said that although there were now bans on the use of microplastics in the manufacture of certain cosmetic products, they were still very widely used.

“People have heard of the microbeads ban in cosmetics and they think the problem is solved,” she explained. “But the bans only refer to very specific products: microbeads are still used in what are called ‘live on’ products such as facial cream, sunscreen, make-up, lipstick. They are used in paint in much bigger volumes: we are talking about building paints, road paints, ship paints. And there are a lot of other applications which consumers are just not aware of.”

Naturbeads uses technology developed at the University of Bath’s Centre for Sustainable and Circular Technologies by Laudisio’s co-founders, Janet Scott and Davide Mattia. The firm’s production process involves cellulose solution being forced through tiny holes in a membrane, creating spherical droplets that are then washed away using vegetable oil. These droplets are then collected, set into beads and separated from the oil before being used in a variety of applications.

Janet Scott (left), Davide Mattia (centre) and Giovanna Laudisio (right)

“Scott and Mattia published a paper on their innovation in 2017 and immediately started to receive a lot of interest from industry – especially cosmetics,” Laudisio explained. “There was already a ban in the United States and the UK’s own ban was coming into force in 2018.”

At this point, Laudisio was working in technology commercialisation in Singapore, but agreed to return to Britain to help launch the company. “I told Scott and Mattia that the fact you have a technology and companies are contacting you at university is a good sign there is a market for your invention. After that, we started talking to investors and doing some market analysis.”

Initial funding for Naturbeads came from a partnership between Innovate UK and Sky Ocean Ventures (SOV), the sustainable investment arm of media company Sky, which raised almost £600,000.

SOV has since invested a further £130,000 with additional funds coming from friends and family to match another Innovate UK grant. As well as investment, Naturbeads has won a number of awards for its technology, including a Blue Tulip award in the climate and energy category earlier this year and it was a finalist place in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2021 Emerging Technologies Competition.

Naturbeads is another in the long list of UK spinouts that have been supported by SETsquared, the world-leading incubator partnership between the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey.

“When the company was in the embryo stage in 2018, we were part of the Sustainable Technologies Business Acceleration Hub, which is run by SETsquared,” Laudisio recalled. “There was a wide range of support available for us to set up the businesses, for example to help us connect with corporates and investors – both in London and through their local networks.”

A major challenge for Naturbeads when it came to fundraising, Laudisio said, was that as a hardware company with a lot of chemistry involved, the business could be more difficult for angel investors to understand.

“But SETsquared has offered us a lot of support, for example in preparing for investor meetings and making funding applications,” she added. “They have access to a good network of investors who are interested in green or clean technologies.”

Naturbeads was now working on a larger fundraising round to help it scale up, Laudisio said “Since we started, we receive on average one material request a week, which is a strong sign there is a need for this technology. But at the moment, we sell in small quantities: the challenge we have is that we have built a pilot plant that can produce up to 1 tonne per year, but the customers we are speaking to want 100 tonnes, for example. So how do we move from where we are to the next stage which is 100 times bigger?”

Naturbeads is looking for £1.2m so it can work with an engineering company to see what a plant capable of producing 100 or 200 tonnes of its biodegradable beads per year would look like. The firm’s success would depend to a large degree on its ability to develop a cost-effective, large-scale production process, Laudisio pointed out. “Plastic is a very inexpensive material, so if we want to replace plastics in all applications – not just premium cosmetics – we need to reduce costs.”

Naturbeads biggest challenge, therefore, would be to attract funding to develop its hardware technology, she explained. “For a company like ours, scaling up is capital intensive so it is very risky for investors. As soon as we close the current round of funding, we will look at how to raise the money we need for our plant.”

One option could be to enter into some form of partnership with a chemical company: “This could mean we share some of the risk, and the partner company may already have facilities we can leverage for some parts of the process so we do not have to build everything from scratch.

“We are already receiving a lot of interest along these lines. But the challenge if we want to go into partnership is mainly related to intellectual property protection: we would have to disclose part of our know-how, and once you disclose it you lose control of it.”