Chemical Challenge Targets Technologies to Overcome Environmental Management Hurdles

How to enable wastewater-free chemical sites? That is the question — or at least one of questions AkzoNobel wants startup firms and other innovators to answer in its Chemicals Startup Challenge.

The aim of the AkzoNobel Chemicals Startup Challenge, launched in conjunction with KPMG, is to identify interesting startups and solutions that have a strategic fit with AkzoNobel’s businesses and develop partnerships with them. The challenge will give the winners the chance to see their ideas become a commercial reality.

By bringing these new technologies and solutions to market, it will also help existing companies improve their environmental management — by reducing water use, making recycling easier and developing safer chemicals, among other things.

The challenge focuses on finding solutions within the following areas:

• Highly reactive chemistry and technology
• Sustainable alternatives to our current technologies
• Bio based sources of ethylene and or ethylene oxides
• Bio based and biodegradable surfactants and thickeners
• Cellulose based alternatives to synthetics
• Revolutionizing plastics recycling
• Wastewater-free chemical sites

KPMG has launched an online challenge platform where participants can submit their solutions and find more detailed information on the challenge.

When the challenge closes in March, teams of subject matter experts will work with participants to determine if their submissions are a good fit for AkzoNobel’s business. A jury made up of AkzoNobel business and R&D leaders and others will then select 20 ideas to participate in a three-day event (all expenses covered) at AkzoNobel’s Open Innovation Center in Deventer, the Netherlands, June 1 to 3.

If a new National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report is any indication, there should be no shortage of promising startups that are working to solve real-world chemical challenges.

The report, Using 21st Century Science to Improve Risk-Related Evaluations, find advances in science and technology are giving businesses and other organizations new approaches for assessing the risks posed by chemicals in the environment.