Founded by a former Queen’s PhD student and post-doctoral fellow, Jeosal Materials Research Corporation is flourishing thanks to its support from the university and Kingston’s innovation ecosystem.
Here’s an interesting statistic: Every year, 43,000 boats in Canada reach the end of their life. That’s boats of all descriptions – sailboats, power boats, kid’s dinghies. They get too old, they are no longer seaworthy, people lose interest, whatever.
Some of those boats – the wooden ones – rot away. Others – the aluminum and steel ones – are relatively simple to recycle. But the fiberglass ones – and today that’s the overwhelming majority – end up sitting in a field somewhere or in a forgotten corner of a marina slowly filling with slimy water. Or more commonly, dumped, intact, into landfills. Thousands of them, every year.
To try to curb this waste, in 2018, Transport Canada working through Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada’s Plastics Challenge invited interested Canadian companies to come up with innovative ways of recycling of glass fiber-reinforced plastic (GFRP). A key requirement was that the process be energy-efficient and would make it worthwhile to re-use the GFRP rather than simply dispose of it.
Osayuki Osazuwa, a Queen’s PhD graduate and former post-doc in the Department of Chemical Engineering may have the solution. He has developed a process that takes fiberglass (or carbon fibre or other similar compounds) and, working very slowly and with minimal use of energy, separates them into their constituent elements – polymers, in hardened forms, and the fibres that they bind to.
That is key – there are at the present time ways to crush these boats, reducing them virtually to a powder that’s a mixture of fibres and polymer. What is left is a low-value material, useful largely only as filler.
Dr. Osazuwa’s idea on how to dispose of GFRP was recognized in April 2019 with an award from Transport Canada of $118,625 to further its development. Then $765,500 for phase two, which concluded in March 2022. Interestingly, this was not his first invention – earlier, while still a post doc, he and his academic supervisor, Queen’s Professor Marianna Kontopoulou, co-developed a novel way of converting graphite to graphene. “That’s when he came to our attention, first,” says Jason Hendry at Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI). From this, Dr. Osazuwa’s company Jeosal Materials Research Corporation was born.
Through working with QPI on the graphene process, Dr. Osazuwa learned about QPI’s programs and services to help firms working in the tech sector move on from the idea stage. Since then, the company has been slowly and methodically growing. Dr. Osazuwa participated in the Queen’s Startup Runway incubation program and continues to access QPI’s Go-to-Market services. With leadership and expertise from QPI’s Patent Team, Dr. Osazuwa applied for patents on his process, the approval of which is currently underway. QPI also, says Hendry, provided him with general business advice, as well as referrals, introductions to funding opportunities, and support in drafting proposals.
At present, with help from Mitacs, Dr. Osazuwa is underwriting a PhD student in Dr, Kontopoulou’s lab at Queen’s to, as he puts it, glean “some academic value from what we have developed so far.”
Jeosal is also deeply involved in the broader Kingston innovation ecosystem. “We have engaged the services of Kingston Process Metallurgy (KPM) and are participating in the KPM Accelerator which helps chemical companies to scale-up.”
Although Jeosal is still quite small, just Dr. Osazuwa and his partner, he says “Right now, in a sense we have quite an advanced team.” Thanks to their connection with KPM, they can draw on “chemists, engineers, machinists, and so on.”
For Dr. Osazuwa, the next stage in development is finding a potential market for the fibres or the polymer waste or for the process itself. He currently has two potential interested parties, one in the United States and one in Germany. In late summer, he had just returned from a two-week stay in Germany, his third visit to the country during the summer.
“We’ve observed that most of the interest in our process comes from Europe, and Germany in particular,” he says. “So, it’s really critical for us to learn about the business culture and how things work over there.”
The firm he is dealing with thinks it may have a market for the fibres that Jeosal’s process can separate from the fiberglass, by melting them down and reusing them in new fibre-based products.
The future looks promising – for Jeosal and the challenge of how to get rid of those 43,000 boats Canadians discard each year. “We understand that this is a big problem,” says Dr. Osazuwa. “And in a short while we are going to have a whole lot of people working for us to help us with the job.”
Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation delivers the Queen’s Startup Runway program, the Wings Acceleration program, and numerous Go-to-Market services to accelerate the growth of entrepreneurs, startups, and SMEs in Eastern Ontario that are advancing technology or science-based innovation. QPI offers these programs and services through the Scale-Up Platform, an initiative led by Invest Ottawa in Eastern Ontario and in which Queen’s is a regional partner. The Scale-Up Platform Project is supported by the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario.