MicroGreen Polymers Inc. (Arlington)

Winner: Manufacturing Innovation of the Year (Small Companies)

By Bill Virgin | June 2010 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Photograph by Hayley Young

Walking on air: Tom Malone leads MicroGreen Polymers, which has developed a method of trapping gas molecules within plastics, making them lighter and less dense.

For more than seven years, MicroGreen Polymers has been developing and refining a University of Washington-developed technology designed to make plastics do more work with less material.

Now, it’s time to put that work to the test. MicroGreen plans to start production this year at its own manufacturing plant to take its Ad-air technology to market (it had been using a contract manufacturer in Wisconsin to prove the concept).

Ad-air combines common plastic materials such as recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) with pressure and carbon dioxide to produce a material that is longer, wider, less dense and double in thickness from the original. By trapping gas molecules within the plastic, producers need less source material to start with and can make lighter products.

The initial target market, says President and Chief Executive Tom Malone, is food packaging. But MicroGreen sees applications in transportation equipment (cutting the weight of plastics used in aircraft materials, for example), building materials and light fixtures, appliances, and electronic displays and casings.

MicroGreen has been busy on multiple fronts. It signed a royalty-bearing licensing agreement with a Japanese consumer-electronics company, secured patents, raised capital ($9.3 million to date) and hired staff to start production.

The company expects to hit commercial volumes of production in the second or third quarters of 2010, but it’s already scouting new markets. Earlier this year, it won a grant of nearly $150,000 from the National Science Foundation for research to be done in collaboration with the UW on wall panels and decorative tiles using plastics formed with the Ad-air process, to make materials that are lower cost, lighter, provide better thermal insulation and higher mold resistance, incorporate more recycled material and are themselves recyclable.

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