Plastics
Capturing $200M by Delivering Sustainable Packaging in 4 Months
The Challenge
A $10B Fortune 500 packaging giant faced pressure to adopt sustainable alternatives, but current bio-plastics had oxygen barriers 3-10× worse than PET. With brands choosing sustainable suppliers within a year, slow innovation risked $200M loss.
What was at stake:
- Consumer brands will pay 20-40% premiums for sustainable options that actually work. But the supplier selection window closes in 12 months
Critical Requirements
- Match PET oxygen barrier (<1.0 cc·mil/m²·day·atm) while staying biodegradable
- >90% breakdown in 180 days
- Use existing production equipment
- Keep costs within 150% of PET at scale
- Maintain mechanical strength above 50 MPa
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Traditional Approach
Conventional bio-polymer development involves a lengthy, step-by-step process resulting in 18-24month development cycles:
- Researchers spend weeks manually searching through scattered literature
- Developing a single formulation from concept to barrier testing takes several months
- Performance, cost, and sustainability are optimized separately, producing materials that may perform well technically but are not economically viable
- There is no structured method to effectively manage the challenging tradeoffs involved
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The Results with N-ERGY AI
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How N-ERGY Compressed Years Into Months
Month 1: Building Intelligence
- N-ERGY’s platform integrated over 2,000 bio-polymer structures with barrier data, automated patent and literature processing, and converted business needs into computational searches. This laid a foundation for strategic exploration.
Month 2-3: Exploring Combinations
- Moving beyond traditional R&D, the platform analyzed 12,000+ polymer-property relationships using molecular simulations, transformer neural networks, and genetic algorithms optimizing performance, manufacturability, cost, sustainability, and supply chain reliability.
- The breakthrough: A unique copolyesters emerged as the optimal, non-obvious solution only found via holistic multi-objective optimization.
Month 4: Success Demonstrated
- Instead of 150–200 experiments, only 45 targeted tests confirmed the top candidates. The resulting bio-based polymer surpassed goals with 0.8 cc·mil/m²·day·atm oxygen transmission and 94% biodegradation within 160 days - exceeding all targets.
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Why N-ERGY's Integrated Platform Made the Difference
The packaging company didn't need another incremental improvement—they needed a material that satisfied impossible-seeming requirements simultaneously, and they needed it before the market closed the door. N-ERGY delivered this by:
- Replacing sequential guesswork with parallel exploration of 12,000+ possibilities
- Discovering non-obvious solutions that emerge only when all constraints are optimized together
- Cutting experimental waste by 77% through intelligent prediction
- Moving at market speed instead of research speed
In sustainability markets, being first with a working solution isn't just valuable, it's the difference between winning $200M contracts and explaining to stakeholders why you weren't ready when customers were buying.
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