BioAmber joins American Business Act on Climate Pledge

BioAmber, a renewable materials company based in Canada, announced that it has joined the American Business Act on Climate Pledge, alongside more than 140 companies from across the American economy that are standing with the Obama Administration to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to climate action and to voice support for a strong outcome to the COP21 Paris climate negotiations.

As part of this initiative, each company is announcing significant pledges to reduce their emissions, increase low-carbon investments, deploy more clean energy, and take other actions to build more sustainable businesses and tackle climate change.

These pledges include ambitious, company-specific goals, ranging from, for example, reducing emissions by as much as 50%, reducing water usage by as much as 80%, achieving zero waste-to-landfill or purchasing 100% renewable energy to pursuing zero net deforestation in supply chains.

BioAmber uses biotechnology to convert renewable sugars into succinic acid, a building block chemical used to make a wide range of products including plastics, paints, textiles, synthetic leather, polyesters and personal care products. The company operates the world's largest succinic acid manufacturing facility, a 30,000 metric ton (70 million pound) capacity plant that opened earlier this year in August, in Sarnia, Canada.

BioAmber has developed renewable technology that is cost competitive with the petroleum-based process for making succinic acid, but that is much more sustainable: it virtually eliminates greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and significantly reduces energy consumption relative to the petrochemical process. The company is currently developing a second product platform that uses biotechnology to produce the building blocks for nylon: it is leveraging its yeast and has exclusively in-licensed a patent protected metabolic pathway that enables the conversion of sugar into adipic acid, hexamethylene diamine (HMD) and caprolactam. These are the monomers used to produce both nylon 6, 6 and nylon 6.

CEO Jean-Francois Huc gave BioAmber’s pledge to support the acceleration to a low carbon economy and the steps the company will take to ensure action on climate change.

The American Business Act on Climate Pledge reads as follows:

“We applaud the growing number of countries that have already set ambitious targets for climate action. In this context, we support the conclusion of a climate change agreement in Paris that takes a strong step forward toward a low-carbon, sustainable future.”

We recognize that delaying action on climate change will be costly in economic and human terms, while accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy will produce multiple benefits with regard to sustainable economic growth, public health, resilience to natural disasters, and the health of the global environment.

Our mission is to produce materials made from renewable resources instead of fossil fuels, offering our customers competitively priced, sustainable building block chemicals that have the cleanest environmental footprint in the industry.

We have made the following pledge to help curb climate change: