Avantium Launches YXY, the New Green Building Block for Materials and Fuels

    AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS, May 20, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Green solutions are the holy grail of industrial innovation today. Every company is anxiously looking for answers to the renewable challenges our world is facing. However, most of these solutions are not stimulating enough. They often build up costs and are difficult to make compatible with existing infrastructure and production assets. This is why Avantium developed YXY, the new green building block for materials and fuels that feeds a green economy by delivering on both price and performance. YXY will be introduced on May 19th.

Sleeping giants.
Sometimes we look so hard for new solutions that we can't see that the answer has been in our hands all along. This is the case with YXY. Many chemists over the past 100 years have studied biomass as the basis for making materials. It makes sense: biomass grows continuously everywhere and it is cheap. The biggest difficulty has been to come up with a technology to make these biomass-based products that can compete with today's products on price and on performance.

When you start looking at which green building blocks have the potential to replace oil-based chemicals, you will always see furanics. Furanics are chemicals that are formed when you take carbohydrates and remove the water. They can be applied for such a wide range of products that researchers, companies and politicians have recognized its huge potential. But up to now no one was able to produce them in a low-cost way: this is why they are referred to as Sleeping Giants.

Avantium discovered the key to unlock the enormous potential of furanics, the ultimate building block for green materials and fuels. Its patented technology converts biomass directly into furanics, the new green building blocks for materials and fuels. It uses carbohydrates as feedstock leading to green and sustainable products. The fast and cost-effective production process is based on catalytic technology provides a good fit with existing production assets.

Eco-nomics!
The world is eager to create new sustainable alternatives for products we use in everyday life. Consumers, governments and corporations are all looking for ways to stimulate green products. This calls for solutions that generate a significantly better environmental footprint, but can also be implemented on a large scale. YXY commits itself to a future where green will be the standard in materials and fuels. This can only be achieved with scale, affordability and the ability to enable existing production methods, processes and new products to emerge from it. The market potential for green is enormous, but only if and when industries are given the means to make green easy and commercially viable.

YXY Live.
YXY is the brand name for our technology to produce green building block for materials and fuels. This means that collaborating with industry players, science and investors is essential in creating a large scale impact. That is why YXY joins forces with organizations like NatureWorks and DAF to create platforms to implement YXY as the building block for making products green from within. The website (www.YXY.com) provides information around YXY, hosts an open innovation platform and a constant flow of news and content around YXY.

Avantium is a leading technology company in the area of advanced high-throughput R&D operating in the energy, chemicals and pharmaceutical industries. The company develops products and processes in the area of biofuels, bio-based chemicals and novel crystal forms of existing drugs by applying its proprietary, high-throughput R&D technology.

Avantium has demonstrated the potential of this technology by providing R&D services and tools to more than 70 companies worldwide. Avantium's customer base includes many of the world's largest energy, chemicals and pharmaceutical companies, such as BP, Shell, Sasol, Pfizer and GSK. Avantium has more than 100 employees; its offices and headquarters are based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

# # #