Jeremiah Turner at Foster’s Daily Democrat has an interesting look at a little ‘green’ startup.
I recently visited a nondescript storefront at an address I will not reveal because industrial espionage is very real when the stakes are high. And in this case they are very high indeed.
Inside was a little startup company called Itaconix, and what they’re doing offers a lesson about the value of education, government dollars used well and the American entrepreneurial spirit.
The founders of this firm have licensed technology created by researchers at the University of New Hampshire. They just began manufacturing “green” polymers that can be used in thousands of products.
This stuff, called itaconic acid, looks like white grit and you’ll pay a lot for it if you need it. Many manufacturers do, to the tune of billions of tons a year. That’s big manufacturing and big bucks, a potential market in the billions of dollars.
Itaconic acid has been made from petroleum until now. UNH has discovered how to make it from bio material and Itaconix has taken that breakthrough and turned it into a viable business.
It is beginning to produce the product using corn and soon hopes to switch to wood chips. This is when things will get really interesting.
Even if Itaconix supplies only a small portion of the nation’s manufacturers, the revenue could be huge as is the potential to grow Seacoast jobs. And then there are the royalty fees that would flow back to UNH for more research on other things.
All this because money was available to a smart group of people who focused on a good idea, and others saw potential in what they discovered and got the capital to take a gamble.
Photo by Itaconix.