Cereplast Exits Manufacturing

Cereplast, a Hawthorne, Calif.-based developer of biobased plastics, is exiting resin manufacturing. The company has a production facility in Hawthorne and was set to soon open a 50 million-lb-per-year plant in Seymour, Ind. The firm now plans to dismiss many of its manufacturing employees. It will instead focus on product development and marketing of compounds based on starches, biobased resins such as polylactic acid, and conventional plastics such as polypropylene. It will outsource manufacturing to plastics compounders. "Building manufacturing capacity is extremely capital and management intensive and best left to those who make it their specialty," says Frederic Scheer, Cereplast's CEO. Separately, Cereplast has hooked up with papermaker Georgia-Pacific to use resins based on polylactic acid in Dixie EcoSmart paper cups.