A startup that just launched in January appears poised to revolutionize the rubber industry. According to TechCrunch, Paris-based baCta has developed a method to grow natural rubber using engineered bacteria in a lab.
Rubber is used in thousands of everyday products. According to Statista, nearly 30 million metric tons of rubber was produced globally in 2022. About half the world's rubber is synthetic, meaning it's made using petroleum, per TechCrunch. The other half is natural, harvested from the sap of Hevea trees.
While the harvesting of natural rubber may sound clean, forests may have been cleared to make room for the Hevea trees, and that's on top of the carbon pollution created during the farming process. Synthetic rubber is much worse, though, generating an estimated 2.5 tons of carbon pollution during the production of only one ton of rubber, according to reTyre.
BaCta says its process is clean. The company currently uses glucose to produce rubber, and is looking to use acetate and carbon in the future.
Besides the carbon pollution factor, natural rubber also degrades much faster than synthetic rubber. Some synthetic rubbers, like tires, can take as long as 2,000 years to decompose.
So this new rubber production method tackles two issues at once. It reduces carbon pollution, which contributes to the overheating of the planet, and cuts down on rubber waste by producing rubber that won't stick around for as long after it's no longer useful.
BaCta has already secured $3.6 million to take the next step toward industrialization. The company will need to figure out how to scale up from producing milligrams of raw materials to producing enough for other companies to use in their products.
The company's plan as of now is to first target luxury fashion/apparel brands that don't need large amounts of material for things like bags and shoes, then expand from there as production capabilities grow.
"Rubber has this advantage where many, many people use it for different usage," said baCta CEO Mathieu Nohut. "So we can actually have a sequential go-to market, where we start with very high-end customers, and then move towards a more mass market. Plus it's a very common, famous, understandable product. So we think it's easier to get people behind the mission with a first product that everybody knows."
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