The Knoxville Mercury profiled four area businesses that it thinks might be the next big idea to come from the town, with Grow Bioplastics being one of them.
The company started as a research idea for Tony Bova while he was a doctoral candidate at UT’s Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education. While completing the Energy Science and Engineering doctorate, Bova and co-founder Jeff Beegle, a biosystems engineering student, came up with the idea of using plant materials to make plastics.
The Mercury article points out that:
To date, they’ve racked up a dozen wins totaling some $137,000 in prize money for their company. Having recently made the Final Four in the American Farm Bureau Rural Entrepreneurship Challenge, they show no signs of slowing down.
The full profile can be seen at the Mercury