How could a Lenoir City startup change your shopping and reduce your trash?

knoxnews.com-Are your Kroger purchases covered in old grease?

In a few years, they might be — if a Lenoir City company succeeds with its research funded by a Kroger-backed charitable foundation.

Two years ago Kroger announced its Zero Hunger/Zero Waste initiative, seeking to increase its donations to food banks, reduce what it throws away, end hunger in towns with a Kroger store, and eliminate internal waste by 2025. Also promised was a $10 million fund at the nonprofit Kroger Co. Foundation to fight hunger and food waste.

Now the first $1 million installment of that grant funding is going out to seven innovative organizations tackling those problems. One is mobius PBC, a biotech startup in Lenoir City.

Mobius is getting $100,000 toward research on turning used cooking oil into biodegradable plastic, which could be used for outside packaging or grocery bags, said Jeff Beegle, mobius co-founder and chief science officer.

“It’s really addressing the zero-waste angle,” he said. Success would make use of waste oil from Kroger and its suppliers, and reduce packaging waste, Beegle said. That dovetails with Kroger’s stated intention of ending single-use plastic bags by 2025.

“We’re looking to potentially provide a biodegradable plastic bag that can be used instead. Or compostable, depending on the technology,” he said.

Over the next two years, mobius wants to build a system that can change 1 to 10 liters of old cooking oil into usable plastic, or into a chemical base for plastic, Beegle said. Then would come commercializing the process and scaling it up to practical size, he said.

already we’ve hired ultimately our sixth employee,” he said. “He will be primarily our lead researcher on this grant.”

That’s Patrick Caveney, who just finished his doctorate in energy science and engineering at the University of Tennessee’s Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education.

But it’ll take more money to make it marketable, so mobius is seeking federal Small Business Innovation Research funds too, Beegle said.

The Innovation Fund got nearly 400 grant applicants in the program’s first year. They were offered a total of $1 million, with each winner eligible for $25,000 to $250,000. Proposals were evaluated by the foundation board plus an advisory council from related groups, according to a Kroger news release. They picked seven winners nationwide.

“Kroger’s bold social impact plan, Zero Hunger/Zero Waste, sets out to end hunger in our communities and eliminate waste across the company by 2025. We know we can’t accomplish this ambitious goal alone, so we supported the development of The Kroger Co. Zero Hunger/Zero Waste Foundation — a public charity established to work with social enterprises, corporations and non-profits that are committed to creating communities free of hunger and waste,” Jessica Adelman, foundation president, said in a news release. “The Foundation’s Innovation Fund was designed to bring like-minded organizations together as philanthropic disrupters — setting a new course on how to partner and change the world. The Foundation’s first cohort of innovators were individually selected due to their big ideas, shared vision and collaborative spirit in achieving a world with Zero Hunger/Zero Waste.”

As its first initiative, mobius is developing soil-biodegradable plastic technology for use in farming and forestry, Beegle said. He and CEO Tony Bova aren’t working with the other grant winners, but are already acquainted with one winning firm in North Carolina and expect to meet the rest soon. Since their work has similar goals, there may be some cross-pollination possibilities, Beegle said.