The problem of scale-up in the UK

From spending his PhD at Warwick University looking for a simple way to make polymers, to spinning out and scaling up his own company, Interface Polymers, Chris Kay has come a long way. But the journey has been anything but straightforward.

Despite finding a product that will fill substantial unmet need across the world, the lack of suitable facilities has made scaling up within the UK unworkable. The company eventually decided to set up a pilot plant in India.

‘It’s taken us 10 years [to get to this point] in part because, as a nation [the UK is] not very well set up for this stuff today,’ says Kay.

Kay set up Interface Polymers with Peter Scott, a chemistry professor at Warwick University. It has grown to a team of 18, and is commercialising two Polarfin products based on diblock copolymers. By bridging two polymer molecules together, they allow different types of plastics to be joined together more strongly. One is a an additive that improves the properties (and hence value) of mixed-material recycled plastics, while the other is a surface coating on polypropylene that makes it stick to common adhesives.

Kay says his company has gone through a ‘pretty classic deep tech journey’ – raising money, setting up a lab to develop the products, and hiring a small business development team to find real-world problems to solve. For the last few years, Interface was ready to move on to the next step of the manufacturing journey: building a dedicated pilot plant to make materials on a larger scale. But this is where they met significant barriers.

There are bits and pieces of money out there, like Innovate UK… but it’s hard work

The team initially visited a Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) site in Wilton, UK. ‘On paper, CPI is where you do this stuff in the UK,’ explains Kay. ‘But our first experience was an empty cabin with a rusty reactor in one corner. We kept thinking they were going to open a door, and it was all going to be behind the door, but the door wasn’t there.’

Deciding Wilton would be too much of a risk, they tried CPI’s Sedgefield site. But again found it lacked the kit or the people needed for their scale-up plans. After that they went much further afield, to an ex-Dow Chemical site in Charleston, US, but found it extortionately expensive. ‘It was designed for this sort of scale up and pilot plant type work. But we spent more than a £1 million making a couple of hundred kilos. At one point, we had about eight engineers that we were funding in the US, at $200–300 an hour per engineer. It cost us a fortune.’

They explored options in Norway and Finland before one of their shareholders recommended looking in India. They were introduced to the chief executive of a small chemical business there and the decision was quickly made that they would build the plant, and that they would also invest in Interface Polymers. ‘A couple of million dollars left India and bought a share of Interface Polymers. The deal was that we would spend most of that money back with them to build and then operate a pilot plant,’ he explains.

Kay says it has been ‘challenging’ working between the UK and India. ’[In manufacturing] you think about quality, speed and cost. We definitely got speed – the plant was built within six months; the cost, we got a lot for $2 million; [but] quality is a continuing challenge.’ The geographic separation doesn’t help, either – it takes at least 24h to get between the two sites. ’We are doing quality control in India, but we’re still at the stage where we want to be trialling stuff [in the UK] and make sure it works in application testing. It just slows everything down.’

Our first experience was an empty cabin with a rusty reactor in one corner. We kept thinking they were going to open a door, but the door wasn’t there

Kay’s experience is far from unique, and he is now committed to enabling other start-ups to grow and achieve in five years, what ultimately took him 10. ‘[I want to share] my experiences in the US, in other European countries, and now, ultimately, with India.’

However, he says there needs to be a proper pipeline system in place for start-ups that could provide them with facilites and guide them through the scale-up journey. This exists in pockets around the country – such as ScienceCreates in Bristol, Kay says – but it needs to be all across the UK.

‘There are bits and pieces of money out there, like Innovate UK… but it’s hard work, the amount of bureaucracy and hoop jumping we’ve got to do for those relatively – in the chemical industry – small pots of money.

‘If you’re serious about building a business that’s going to be turning over hundreds of millions, you’ve got to make educated bets of a larger size to have a chance of delivering on a larger scale. ‘In the UK, we talk big about advanced manufacturing. But if we’re really serious about that, we need to be placing much bigger bets than we currently do.’

Kay says, that as a nation, the UK is ‘very good’ at inventing. ‘But what’s the point of all this knowledge generation, all the funding and taxpayer money, if we’re not going to take it at least one or two steps further to turn those inventions into lots of high value jobs.’