click to enlarge - Anne Wallace Allen ©️ Seven Days
- Joe Giallanella
A company that’s working on a biodegradable alternative to fossil fuel-based products as diverse as car seats and diaper filling has received $21 million from investors, including Vermont’s own
Dudley Fund and the
Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies.
ZymoChem is based in California, but it opened an office in Vermont in 2022 in order to tap the expertise of people who’ve worked in local sustainable products companies such as Seventh Generation. Its investors include
Toyota Ventures and lululemon athletica.
Forty-five people work for ZymoChem, three of them in Vermont. Its CEO and its Vermont leader expect those numbers to grow as the company explores uses for its patented
patented polymer, which uses feedstocks such as sugar from corn.
Joe Giallanella, the company’s vice president and general manager of consumer products, is setting up ZymoChem’s consumer brands division at the VCET coworking space and said he plans to hire three more people this year. Giallanella moved to Vermont in 2015 to help Seventh Generation revamp its baby care brands. He expects Vermont shoppers to provide a good test of which sustainable and carbon-free items are likely to take off in the store.
“We have big, lofty goals of upending massive global industries,” Giallanella said, citing personal care and hygiene, industrial coatings, agricultural products, and textiles as possible uses for ZymoChem’s technology. “We see using consumer interest as a great way to motivate larger companies to swap in our material for theirs.”
ZymoChem was founded in 2013 by Harshal Chokhawala and Jon Kuchenreuther, a pair of research chemists at the University of California, Berkeley who were looking for an alternative to the petroleum-based products that go into a vast array of consumer goods.
The two won a $1 million
federal grant in 2020. Two years and $12 million in other grants later, they started working directly with the clothing company lululemon to develop petroleum-free fabrics and last month received $21 million from several investors, including the two in Vermont.
Chokhawala, now CEO, chose Vermont for the second office because it’s home to many companies that promote sustainable business practices, such as King Arthur Baking and snowboard maker Burton. Many other cities support food cooperatives, farmers markets and other sustainable organizations, "but it's more pronounced here than anywhere else," said Giallanella, who has spent a career researching consumer behavior. "Green-leaning eco-friendly products are what consumers are seeking ."
One of those products is environmentally friendly diapers, long a source of moral conflict for parents who crave the convenience of disposables but hesitate to throw the large, bulky, petroleum-based items into the trash. A 2015 report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 20 billion disposable diapers are added to landfills each year.
“These plastics persist in the environment for hundreds and thousands of years, when they’re only used in some cases for a few minutes or hours,” said Chokhawala, who has young twins.
Cloth diapers are a popular alternative, but they’re difficult to store and handle, and many parents who use cloth say they’d prefer to use a disposable diaper that would break down in the trash.
Diaper fillings often contain a small amount of wood pulp, but they also use petroleum gel as the superabsorbent polymer that does a diaper's most important job. It's not just the plastics that have a high carbon footprint, Chokhawala said; the process of making them does, too. His goal is to sell the company's superabsorbent polymer to the makers of diapers and other hygiene products.
“What we want to demonstrate to the industry and the world and to all chemical companies is that consumers want more sustainable solutions to these types of problems,” he said.
Many diaper companies describe their product as a green alternative. One, a plant-based brand called Kudos, struck a $250,000 investment deal on
Shark Tank in 2023 with host Mark Cuban and guest host Gwyneth Paltrow. But Kudos says on its website that while its diapers are lined with cotton, it has to use petroleum-based superabsorbent polymer as the stuffing for now because no alternatives are being manufactured commercially. It's that commercial manufacturing that Chokhawala hopes to provide.
Giallanella, who became familiar with the vagaries of the diaper market while at Seventh Generation, added that many of the sustainable diapers available now are too expensive for most parents — and aren't as reliable as the plastic ones. A box of 198 newborn Huggies is $50 at Target, or about 25 cents per diaper, while a pack of 36 newborn-size Seventh Generation diapers sells on Amazon for $27, or 75 cents each.
"People don’t want to pay a green premium, especially if it’s not performing well," Giallanella said. "And if
your brand is leaky, you don’t have a brand at all."
Half a dozen investors from around the U.S., including VCET, joined the January fundraising round that has jump-started hiring at ZymoChem. Toyota Ventures, the auto company's venture capital firm, is looking for alternatives to petroleum-based components in several industries, Chokhawala said. lululemon athletica is committed to being net-zero by 2050 and started using plant-based nylon last year, according to its
2022 impact report.
John Antonucci, a managing partner at the Burlington-based Dudley Fund, said his group expects ZymoChem to grow under Giallanella’s leadership in Vermont. “He is backed by an incredible group of scientists who are changing the way many industries will produce synthetic materials,” Antonucci said.
Giallanella, a parent of two who describes himself as a veteran diaper changer, views the diaper discussion as a matter of equity.
"We see an opportunity to democratize the ability to have more sustainable ingredients in a diaper for all, as opposed to just those who can afford it," he said.
Corrections, February 7, 2024: An earlier version of this post contained errors that have since been fixed. A grants figure, the Shark Tank
date and a description of the company's polymer have been updated for accuracy.