Brad Rodgers is the Vice President of Danimer Scientific, a biotechnology company that works towards transitioning fossil-based plastics to biopolymers, particularly, specializing in PHA-based materials. Brad initially started his career in polymer research for sustainable packaging applications and became a sustainable food and beverage packaging expert. While working at PepsiCo, he already tried to answer the question of the most environmentally friendly solution for short-term packaging applications. This led him to the world of biopolymers or bioplastics, as we sometimes call them.

Biopolymers, such as polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), are naturally-sourced and biodegradable plastic materials. It's one of the solutions to tackle our plastic waste problem, but also has bottlenecks in the development process, and when it comes to changing the mainstream attitudes of the consumers (affecting how biopolymers are adopted). Although that's the case, we discussed in this episode that currently, more and more large companies have made investments and efforts to upscale the technologies to bring innovation to mass production. During our talk, we also touch upon other important factors affecting the development of bioplastics.

Find out more about Danimer Scientific at https://danimerscientific.com/ and feel free to reach out to Brad via LinkedIn.