Over the past year, California based Entropy Resins has partnered with several sporting goods companies to bring the Super Sap technology to market. One of these companies, Niche Snowboards of Utah, uses a proprietary version of Super Sap across its entire snowboard line.
“From the start we wanted to design and build a product where every component had some environmental improvement over the industry standard,” states Dustin Morrell, COO of Niche. “However, snowboards go through an incredible amount of abuse so we had to make sure these components were not only eco-friendly but also performed. Entropy Resins was able to deliver on both goals.”
Entropy Resins is expanding into the larger composites markets like wind energy, transportation, and civil engineering.
“With new industry standards and government legislation focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and maximising the sustainability of our natural resources, we feel there are further opportunities for our bio-based technology,” says Desi Banatao, lead applications engineer for Entropy.
Later this year, Entropy will introduce a line of coatings and adhesive products aimed specifically at the construction industry, as well as resin infusion systems for making large composite parts.
Entropy Resins’ Super Sap epoxy is based on a patent pending process that replaces petroleum-based chemicals with those sourced from bio-renewable feedstock and waste streams of other industrial processes.
“By sharing bio-renewable feed stocks with other industries, like the paper pulp and bio-fuels industries, and using manufacturing processes that require less energy and water we can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of our resins,” reports Rey Banatao, Entropy’s lead biochemist. “Considering resins can be more than 50% of the volume in a composite structure, these savings can be environmentally significant.”
“Historically, bio-derived materials have been used in the resin industry as diluents or plasticizers in adhesives and coatings, which is usually opposite of what you want in a composite,” he continues. “However from the beginning our goal has been to employ bio-derived technologies that not only match the performance of existing petroleum-based composites but surpass them in certain areas.”
