Calgary-based manufacturer says it's created country's first supply of 100% compostable PPE

A Calgary-based company is joining up witha Winnipeg company to manufacturewhat they believe isthe country's first 100 per centcompostablepersonal protective equipment (PPE) although they're still in the process of getting it acceptedatCanadian composting facilities.

Calgary-basedRoswell Downhole Technologies Inc., has been acquired byPrecision ADM,a medical device company and global engineering and manufacturing solutions provider based in Winnipeg, the companies announced last week.

By October, the two companies intend to be operating two facilities, one in Calgary and one in Winnipeg, usingcrop-based biopolymers to make compostable, medically certified fabric ina full range ofsurgical medical masks, gowns and other medical PPE, air and water filtration products, and personal hygiene products.

The companies expect tocreate 350 jobs in the two prairie cities.

Kyle Fiolka, president ofRoswell,told CBC News thecompany's specialty used to be making downhole cables for oil and gas well monitoring.

But theCOVID-19 pandemicpushed it to switch gears.

"We were in oil and gas producing tubing, but our asset was actually our ability to invent and innovate new processes because that's actually what we had spent most of our careers doing," he said.

When the opportunity arose to instead produce something needed during the pandemicmore than a year ago, heand his partner at Roswell started doing some more research.

In just sevendays, the two started making meltblown filter media the fabric needed to make face masks.

"We became very quickly a leader in this space because frankly, Canada didn't have a lot of that capacity, even in large scale prior to COVID."

As the new venture took off, so did the number of ideas they had for it.Since most medical equipment is made from oil-based polypropelene,Roswellusedcrop-based biopolymers to make the compostable, medically certified fabric.

"Then the conversation started to continue on, like we can push this into respiration," he said.

"You see gowns on medical workers, those are all materials that could be produced in Calgary with sustainable materials that have a carbon offset associated with them."

Fiolka says Roswellcan make enough meltblown material to produce up to 50 million masks or other compostable PPE.

"Our vision is to,you know, really address all of the gaps we saw during COVID with supply chain and offshore purchasing and quality," he said.

"You know, get all of these other products across the finish line so we can make as big of a carbon impact in the medical space and in non-medical space as we can."

The two companiesarestillawaiting ASTM D6400 certification, whichvalidates that their products meet requirements atmunicipal or industrial composting facilities.

In an email to CBC News,Precision ADM declined to say what exact material was in the product, saying it's proprietary information.

However, it didsay the bio materialis meant to be composted in an industrial composting facility rather than a backyard composter so high temperatures and an oxygen-freeenvironment can decompose the product without adverse greenhouse gases.

The quest for compostable plastics

Making productscompostable isn't a guarantee that they'll be accepted by composting facilities and programs in a given region, especially compostable plastics.

As CBC science writer Emily Chung explained in a 2020 article, abenefit of degradable or compostable plastics is that theycan theoretically reduce harm to wildlife and ecosystems caused by traditional plastics and reduce the need for landfill space. That's because they can be broken down completely into carbon dioxide, water and compost under certain conditions without leaving behind microplastics.

That said, Chung continued, even popular compostable plastics such as PLA(polylactic acid), which isused to make drinking cups, clamshell containers and plastic cutlery, are not accepted by most municipal composting programs in Canada, and some commercial ones.

That means they're often sent tolandfill, where one study estimated they wouldtake more than a century to break downand another found they wouldrelease the potent greenhouse gas methane during decomposition.