PhaBuilder

Guoqiang Chen has spent most of his 4-decade scientific career training microbes to make plastic. And he sees PhaBuilder , which he cofounded in 2021 with two of his former students, Yuxuan Lan and Fuqing Wu, as the culmination of all that work. The company’s name evokes both the polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) that it produces and the success Chen hopes to achieve—“Pha” is pronounced like the Mandarin word fa, which can mean “fortune” or “wealth.” PHAs are produced by fermentation of plant-derived substances such as starch or canola oil. Depending on the microbes and the materials they’re fed, PHAs can be concocted with properties resembling those of polyolefins and other fossil fuel–based plastics. And unlike polylactic acid (PLA), the largest-volume plant-based plastic today, PHAs are fully compostable without a special facility. But despite PHAs’ many appealing qualities, companies that make them have long struggled to reduce costs and increase production capacity