Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. I'm very pleased to be here today to speak on behalf of Performance BioFilaments as part of your study on the secondary supply chain products coming from the Canadian forestry sector. Copies of my remarks have been made available to you.
I'm Gurminder Minhas, the managing director of Performance BioFilaments, one of Canada's new and emerging biomaterials companies. We are leading the biomaterials revolution by improving the performance of many existing and new products while making our planet more sustainable with the use of forest-based renewable resources.
Performance BioFilaments was launched in 2014 as a joint venture between Vancouver-based Mercer International and Montreal-based Resolute Forest Products. Aside from myself, within the company we have two Ph.D. research scientists, two research associates, one full-time business development director, and two part-time business development professionals.
Performance BioFilaments is focused on providing microfibrillated and nanofibrillated cellulose products in application areas where they can add significant performance improvements in existing and new products combined with environmental benefits. Our core technology has been licensed from FPInnovations and involves the utilization of kraft pulp and other fibres as a feedstock and converting them into micro and nanofibrillated cellulose, also known as cellulose filaments. We're also developing our own processes and technologies for modifying these fibres and filaments to make them more suitable for specialized applications, where traditionally cellulosic fibres have not had widespread use, so we're actually creating new markets for some of the fibres that come from our forestry resources. Some of these applications include fibre-reinforced plastics and thermosets.
I'll highlight an example of a project we did with NRC's automotive and surface transportation group, where we successfully introduced cellulosic fibres into reinforced polypropylene. We achieved a similar strength to glass-fibre-reinforced polypropylene, the same strength, but at the same time we achieved a 16% reduction in the weight of these components. Plastic lightweighting is a major goal that the automotive sector is looking for.
We're also developing applications in high-performance concrete. In a study we did with UBC Civil Engineering, we demonstrated a 20% improvement in the compressive strength of concrete while virtually eliminating cracking due to plastic shrinkage. This was achieved by only a 0.1% addition of our cellulosic fibres into the concrete matrix, that is, a 20% increase in strength and elimination of cracking with a 0.1% addition of our material.
Another application we're developing is air and liquid filtration media. We've demonstrated improvements in the strength of the filtration medium while giving the filter manufacturer the ability to control pore size, thus allowing them to further engineer the filtration media that they're producing.
As you can see, Performance BioFilaments is developing applications in some very diverse and large markets. Our commercialization strategy is focused on becoming experts in the production and modification of cellulosic biomaterials. That said, we rely on subject matter experts at universities and research institutions to help us accelerate the use of our materials in some of these new applications. We are not experts in the plastics sector, we're not experts in concrete, and we're not experts in filtration media; we are experts in creating fibres that can perform to certain characteristics that are demanded by these industries. Then we rely on others, for example at the university level, at the institution level, and on their expertise in certain centres of excellence within Canada to help accelerate the development of our applications of our materials into these markets.
We've leveraged several government funding programs to date, such as NSERC engage grants and IRAP funding, to accelerate our application development work. These programs have allowed us to take advantage of the expertise and specialized equipment located within research institutions and Canadian universities.
Performance BioFilaments is also developing our first commercial plant. This plant will produce products for sale into our established markets as well as allow for accelerated development into new applications. As this is a first-of-kind plant, the risk is going to be quite high and we don't expect that we would qualify for traditional methods of project financing. We are looking to programs such as IFIT, SDTC, and the new NRCan clean growth program to help support getting our technology to commercial scale.
Specific to the question of how the Government of Canada can further support and accelerate the development of secondary supply chain products in the forestry sector, I have the following recommendations.
First, increased support for high-risk capital projects, specifically for demonstration and first of kind commercial plants, is needed. The IFIT program is a very good program. It was created to address this particular need and to provide financial assistance for innovative projects through a competitive selection process.
Previous IFIT calls have been extremely popular with the industry but have resulted in many good projects remaining unfunded. Continued investment in the IFIT program, as well as an annual or semi-annual request for projects from IFIT, will help the industry plan for capital projects accordingly. The SDTC program and the newly developed NRCan clean growth program will also help on this front, and these programs should be continued and broadened.
Second, government support in the early parts of the innovation cycle needs to be expanded. Increased support for universities and institutions to conduct new and innovative research, which typically is higher risk, should be considered and supported. This will create a pipeline of new innovations for companies such as ours to leverage, with the potential of licensing and commercializing these newly innovative technologies that are going to be produced based on the basic research and the fundamental research that is being conducted at universities.
Above and beyond that, this is also going to produce highly trained student researchers who will be ideal candidates for our future employees. Partnership funding such as NRC IRAP and the NSERC Engage grants should be further continued and expanded to allow for a greater opportunity for industry to collaborate with universities and research institutions.
Finally, on the market development side, support for new products should also be considered in both international and domestic markets so that we can appreciate that the majority of the products that we and others are developing are intended for international markets. Support for Canadian companies to become early adopters of these new materials would be very helpful in demonstrating the use and effectiveness of these materials at large scale, and it will help pave the road for expanding the applications that we create here in Canada to international markets.
In closing, I would like to just say that Canadian companies commercializing Canadian innovations created by Canadian researchers will create a win-win-win situation.
Thank you. I will take questions as they come.
