The North American affiliate of German chemicals giant BASF (Ludwigshafen; www.basf.com) recently opened its Biodegradation and Microplastics Center of Excellence at its site in Wyandotte, Michigan. The center’s targets, the company says, include providing tailored solutions and consulting for customers, increasing speed-to-market for circular-economy products, and advocating on sustainability topics.

The site includes a new building housing a laboratory to support biodegradable product development primarily in food service and packaging, agriculture, detergents, cleaning, and cosmetics industries. It is expected to have the capability to assess rates of disintegration for novel compostable products designed to divert food waste to composting facilities.

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The R&D portfolio at the Wyandotte site includes chemicals, materials, formulations, analytics, and piloting. Information from analytical testing at the site will vary from disintegration performance of compostable materials to biodegradation performance of novel chemistries, to unique insights on microplastics and the behaviour of plastics through their life cycles.

In 2019, BASF had established development centres in Wyandotte for its Elastollan TPU and footwear solutions.