Leading brands understand that trust requires transparency and protecting brand reputation involves not just commitments but action on corporate responsibilities. These responsibilities extend deep into supply chains, including the chemical building blocks of everyday products.
The demand for sustainable chemicals has been constrained only by supply, until now. Circa’s bio-based solvent Cyrene™ is one of the few novel, multipurpose solvents to be developed in over 40 years. It is a sustainable solvent that can often outperform the toxic petroleum-based materials that society demands to be eliminated from use.
Is your business ready to replace NMP?
The EU Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability and the development of ‘safe and sustainable by design’ criteria by ECHA foreshadow the elimination of toxics solvents such as NMP and DMF. Preparing for REACH and TSCA developments protects your supply chain from regulated changes, minimises EHS risk and satisfies growing sustainability drivers from both customers and investors. Cyrene™ has been proven to outperform NMP, DMF in 20-30% of applications trialled to date, click here to see where Cyrene™ best performs.
Novel sustainable solvents
With solubilising properties similar to NMP/DMF, Cyrene™ has a unique property set, including viscosity, surface tension and tuneable polarities.
It is low-toxic, environmentally benign, biodegradable, biocompatible and recyclable as well as circular and bio-based with low water usage and low carbon emissions. Most importantly, it can be produced at scale.
We are building our first-of-a-kind 1,200 tpa plant in France with the goal of 80,000 tpa global offtake capacity by 2030, including in Asia, the Americas and Europe.
NeuDrive has been a customer of Circa for the last 3 years and has successfully developed organic electronic inks using Cyrene. Apart from the clear safety and environmental benefits of Cyrene versus previously used solvents (e.g. NMP, DMF), we have identified additional technical benefits in our process, making it a strategically important material for us.
Shashi Pandya, Head of Science, NeuDrive Ltd.
Sustainability
Cyrene™ is a bio-based solvent that demonstrates circularity, sustainability and safety at every stage of its life cycle. From fossil-free non-food feedstock, to its recyclability and end of life disposal, Cyrene™ is a safer and more sustainable alternative to traditional toxic petroleum-based solvents.
Biocompatible, biodegradable, will not bioaccumulate, and no harmful NOx and SOx emissions on decomposition
Low-flammability, non-corrosive and low-toxicity permits safer storage, transport and worker practices
Independent life cycle analysis shows that the production of Cyrene™ has a carbon footprint up to 80% lower than NMP and DMF.
EU REACH Annex VIII obtained, Annex IX and US TSCA registration underway
Recyclable with the development of large-scale re-utilisation processes in progress
Regional, short, resilient supply-chains without co-product derived bottlenecks
Performance
The application of Cyrene™ extends across multiple markets, such as pharmaceuticals, paints and coatings, polymers and plastics, electronics, carbon technologies, agriculture, speciality chemicals, textiles, automotive, cosmetics and more.
It is used in membrane formation, graphene dispersion, textile recycling, battery production and recycling, polyurethane production, extractive distillation, natural product extraction, cleaning and paint stripping, monomers for polymerisation, coatings and recrystallisation. Trialled in over 1,000 industry applications with over 150 published scientific papers, Cyrene™ has been shown to outperform traditional aprotic solvents in ~25% of industrial tests to date. Selected applications are described below.
Carbon black and graphene
Cyrene™ suspends and disperses solids with higher concentration of loading and distribution, up to ten times better than industry leading solvents.
Membrane technologies
Cyrene™ has been used extensively to produce membranes with a controllable range of pore sizes for separation applications, including water purification and gas separation. The processes have resulted in less polymer loss, greater porosity and increased thermal stability than NMP membranes, whilst allowing for the inclusion of high amounts of additives, such as graphene.
Paints and Coatings
Cyrene™ biocompatibility, non-corrosive nature and antimicrobial properties make it ideal for use in the paints and coatings industries.
