Bioplastics award give to smartphone innovation

Two companies have been jointly awarded the 2015 Bioplastics Award for their collaboration on the world’s first biobased engineering plastic used in the front panel of a smartphone.

Mitsubishi Chemical Corp. and Sharp Corp. (Japan) jointly received the prize for the development of the front panel of Sharp’s new smartphone made from Mitsubishi’s biobased engineering plastic, ‘Durabio’.

Durabio is a biobased engineering plastic made from plant-derived isosorbide. This high-performance material reportedly offers greater resistance to impact, heat, and weather than conventional engineering plastics. In addition, it has excellent transparency and low optical distortion.

The panel of judges singled out this application as the first instance of a biobased engineering plastic successfully replacing polycarbonate in a technical application.

They said the development captivates through its high profile and the potentially huge field of applications for a biopolymer that also overcomes one of the big problems of incumbent technology – impact resistance.

The prize was awarded by bioplastics magazine to the winning companies on November 5th, 2015 during the 10th European Bioplastics Conference in Berlin, Germany.

 “The winner has invented a highly promising material for very challenging applications - and we applaud this cool product,” commented Michael Thielen, publisher of bioplastics magazine. “It's a great example of a biobased material.”