NEWS RELEASE
Sept 6, 2007
FSI Announces Agreement to Purchase Land and Building to Begin Biomass Conversion
A Chemical Engineer has been appointed to over see construction and operation of the Plant
VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, Sept 6, 2007 – FLEXIBLE SOLUTIONS INTERNATIONAL, INC. (AMEX: FSI, FRANKFURT: FXT), is the developer and manufacturer of biodegradable and environmentally safe water and energy conservation technologies, as well as anti-scalant technology. Today the Company announces the agreement to purchases 3.23 acres of land and a 55,000 square foot building. The location is Taber, Alberta, 120 miles south of Calgary and 50 miles from the US border at Montana.
Taber is the western Canadian center of sugar beet farming and FSI will use locally grown sugar to ferment into aspartic acid and other valuable byproducts. The aspartic acid will be sold directly to our NanoChem Solutions (NCS) subsidiary in Illinois for further manufacture into poly-aspartic acid. Nameplate capacity of the Taber plant is 5,000 metric tons per year and start-up is planned for fall 2008.
CEO, Dan O’Brien states, “The purpose of the facility is to decouple our dependence on oil derived aspartic acid and introduce a biologically derived sugar based substitute. The process not only results in recovery of margins lost to high oil prices but also utilizes a more environmentally friendly renewable resource.” Mr. O’Brien adds, “The beet growers of Alberta can supply us with enough sugar to expand this plant to 10 or even 20 times the starting capacity. We are proud to begin one of the first bio-factories in the world that converts an agricultural crop to valuable biochemical products.”
Once the aspartic acid is converted to poly-aspartic acid (TPA) at the NCS factory it is sold to a number of very large industries. For oil extraction, TPA substitutes for toxic materials that keep the recovery pipes from clogging. In dish and laundry detergents, TPA is a fully biodegradable substitute for poly-acrylates that build up in the environment. Another primary use is in agriculture as a fertilizer enhancer where addition of poly-aspartate at ½ of one percent can increase yield per acre by 10-15%. FSI expects that substituting lower cost sugar versus oil as an input could have a huge impact on demand for TPA.
World attention to environmentally sound behavior is driving increased use of TPA. Poly-acrylates are a widely used non-biodegradable product that can be replaced by biodegradable TPA made by FSI. Countries like Norway are advanced in this arena and the rest of Europe is moving in the same direction. A city (or country) of five million people dumps more than five million pounds per year of poly-acrylates into the eco-system through dish and laundry detergent use. FSI is strongly focused on this major opportunity to replace incumbent chemicals with our biodegradable products made from renewable resources
In related news, Mr. Edward Zhang, chemical engineer, has been hired to oversee construction and operation of the facility. This will be Mr. Zhang’s third major project; he has successfully managed the construction and start-up of two fertilizer plants with capacities of 110 and 130 thousand tons per year. “I am excited about the potential of using sugar beets in place of oil, especially when the end product is used to make green chemicals for the oil, water and agriculture industries.” says Mr. Zhang. He continues, “I brought my family to Canada for clean air and water so it is a great pleasure to be part of such an environmentally focused company.”