A new world of opportunities has opened up for Burnaby entrepreneur Gordon Shank after winning a provincewide challenge with his innovative biodegradable yarn.
Shank specializes in advanced materials – specifically fibres. For years, he’s been selling his BioMid sustainable fibre to governments and private companies around the world.
“I’d only ever thought to use fibres as a reinforcement for resin in some very complicated military or aerospace product, and that’s a very limited market in Canada,” he said.
But last year, while lamenting there were too few clients in Canada for his special string, a friend suggested he try something different and enter the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and the B.C. Innovation Council’s innovation challenge.
So Shank went to work adapting BioMid so it could be used in an agricultural setting. It didn’t take much, he said, as most of the work had already been done. Once complete, the yarn provided an alternative to synthetic products often used in greenhouses. BioMid is made from B.C. forest product waste and, because it is fully compostable, it doesn’t have to be separated from organic waste.
Earlier this month, the provincial government announced that BioMid, along with three other innovations had won the challenge.
BioMid’s first agricultural application was on a 20-acre bell pepper farm in Abbotsford where about 3,000 kilometres of BioMid was used to replace the petroleum-based, synthetic yarn.
“I honestly didn’t know what to expect,” he said of the competition. “As far as I knew I could, maybe, if I crossed my fingers, be first, but maybe dead last; I might even get laughed out of the place, who knows. As it turns out, whoa. I mean I didn’t even know peppers grew up a string.”
Looking back, Shank can’t help but be proud and also surprised at how far he’s come.
Having been taken during the Sixties Scoop, when First Nations children were taken from their homes and placed in foster care or adopted, opportunities were scarce or hard to come by with so little experience, Shank said. The best thing he could do was go into business for himself.
“Too often, on your 18th birthday you fall into homelessness and pennilessness, right? So it’s kind of tough; the only thing you can do is more or less menial jobs and really the only thing you could do to better your life is to start a business,” he said. “It’s really the only thing you don’t need a lot of qualifications for.”
Now, almost 50 years old, Shank has travelled all over the world selling his advanced material products, like BioMid.
Its new application means there’s an entirely new sector out there waiting for solutions, and Shank hopes to capitalize on that.
“For whatever reason, the little things, the little tiny details (in the agriculture sector), they kind of get overlooked, but in order for continuous improvement, you have to look at the little details as well, one by one by one,” he said, “and if you add up all these little details, they can equal a big, huge, disruptive innovation.”
Already, there’s a growing list of possible commercial applications for BioMid, even beyond the agriculture sector, Shank said.
He’s donated the yarn to more than 100 universities that have already begun projects using the sustainable fibre, including using it in the development of lighter and more fuel-efficient cars and the next generation of lithium ion batteries, he added.
