South Korean spandex maker Hyosung has announced plans to invest US$1bn in a site in Vietnam to produce bio-based 1,4-butanediol (BDO).
Typically made from coal or natural gas, BDO is a chemical used as a raw material for poly-tetramethylene-ether-glycol (PTMG), which is used to make spandex.
In addition to spandex, BDO applications include engineering plastics, biodegradable packaging, footwear insoles and industrial compounds.
Bio-BDO is manufactured by fermenting sugars derived from sugarcane.
Using Genomatica’s fermentation technology, sugar would be converted into BDO at the site which would then be used to mass-produce regenTM BIO spandex at the company’s Dong Nai Spandex factory, Hyosung said on 3 April.
“The bio business … will become a core pillar of Hyosung for the next 100 years … strengthening our global sustainable market penetration based on our production of Bio-BDO and Bio Spandex,” Hyosung chairman Hyun-Joon Cho said.
The company said it planned to produce 50,000 tonnes/year of BDO by 2026 and 200,000 tonnes/year by 2035.
Hyosung said its plans involved increasing its sales of sustainable spandex, which currently accounts for 4% of its total spandex sales, to about 20% by 2030.
In 2021, global capacity for BDO was nearly 4M tonnes with demand around 2.5M tonnes, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights.
Most BDO is produced in China, where many plants use coal as a source material, according to a report by Chemical & Engineering News on 2 April.
