INNOVATION NORTH
ONTARIO
HOW ONTARIO IS ATTRACTING OUTSTANDING COMPANIES
By Daniela Fisher
EcoSynthetix: LIVING IN A BIO-BASED MATERIAL WORLD Finding ways to cut down our use of petroleum has become a pressing need in the global community. With a growing world population burning through oil and gas, in the past 150 years alone, we’ve consumed half the world’s known oil supply. Finding an alternative to this raw material is not an option, it’s a must. You may or may not be surprised to learn that Ontario is home to one of the companies leading the world in the move away from petroleum-based products. With a goal of using renewable resources to create products traditionally made from petroleum, Burlington’s EcoSynthetix is establishing itself as an innovator in the field of green chemistry. EcoSynthetix specializes in developing and producing environmentally friendly, carbon neutral products. More specifically, the start-up company has developed an eco-friendly coating for paper products such as magazines or business cards. It uses a bio-based polymer to coat paper and paperboard products, making them infinitely more biodegradable and recyclable than their petroleum-containing counterparts. The company’s work is part of the growing trend of using bio-based materials – materials created from biological matter or renewable resources like crops or plants – to make products currently produced from petroleum. Based out of Burlington, the cleantech company is an Ontario success story. Not only did the company voluntarily choose to move its R&D and head offices from Michigan to Ontario in 2010, it also built a state-of-the-art Centre of Innovation in Burlington for high tech R&D, attracting top level talent to the province. Since then, EcoSynthetix has set down
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Biotechnology Focus / April 2013
John van Leeuwen, EcoSynthetix co-founder and CEO. Photo credit for photo and cover image: Jonathan Bielaski, Light Imaging.
successful roots in Ontario and is making a case for why the province can be an attractive place to do business in the cleantech sector. In 2011, the company completed an IPO to the tune of $100 million, the largest cleantech IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange to date. Additionally, EcoSynthetix was ranked the second fastest growing cleantech company (Tesla Motors took first) in Deloitte’s 2012 Technology Fast 500, a ranking of the fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean tech companies
in North America. In February of this year, the company received Life Sciences Ontario’s Emerging Company of the Year Award. As these accolades suggest, the emerging clean tech company is making a name for itself in Canada, as well as across the globe. “I’m certainly personally very, very bullish about the future. I think the focus on sustainability is not optional, it’s a must,” says EcoSynthetix co-founder and CEO John van Leeuwen. “If we want our society to continue to thrive, we have to do this. I think we’re showing that a
