At Balena, we’re always exploring how far circular, bio-based materials can go not just in fashion and footwear, but in everyday products that bring people together. Our latest milestone? Launching the world’s first frisbee made from BioCir® X, a bacteria-fermented bioplastic that’s designed to perform hard and return safely to nature.

To dive deeper into the science, challenges, and joy behind this project, we sat down with Galy Levy, Balena’s Head of R&D, who’s been at the heart of bringing this vision to life.

Q: Why did you want to make a frisbee out of BioCir® X?

Galy:

It’s a fun product, right? Everyone has a story with a frisbee, playing at the beach, in the park, with your father as a kid. It’s something that lives in every household. So for me, it was personal. It felt like closing a loop to take something we all grew up playing with and remake it from a material that’s sustainable, compostable, and circular. Plus, it’s our first step into the sports world which is an exciting industry with huge potential.

Q: What was the biggest technical challenge?

Galy:

Honestly, everything! When you’re trying to replace conventional plastics with something biodegradable the challenges are endless. Most solutions in our industry just aren’t built to be environmentally friendly; they're optimized purely for performance or price, not for what happens after.

For us, the biggest hurdle was finding the perfect balance in the material’s properties. We needed something rigid enough to keep its shape and fly like a real frisbee, but not so rigid that it would crack under stress. It also had to bend, fold, absorb impact, and still snap back to its original form without warping or breaking, all with a commitment to environmental responsibility and consideration of the product's end-of-life impact. That meant going all the way down to the micro level carefully engineering the chemical structure so it would behave exactly the way we wanted at the macro level, as a finished product.

It’s like solving a giant puzzle, where every piece of elasticity, strength, toughness, biodegradability has to fit together seamlessly. And getting there took countless trials, adjustments, and a willingness to rethink everything we knew about how a polymer should perform.

Q: Could you walk us through how you engineered BioCir® X to perform like this?

Galy:

Absolutely. We started by looking closely at the benchmark the conventional materials already used in sports products like frisbees. We really took them apart in a scientific sense: studying their mechanical behavior, how they handle stress and strain, their rheological properties, basically, how they flow and deform under force.

Once we had that full picture, we compared it against our own early formulations of BioCir® X. We mapped out where the gaps were, property by property: maybe we had the right flexibility but not enough stiffness, or it was tough but not quite elastic enough.

Then it became a process of carefully tweaking changing ingredient ratios, adding or removing certain bio-based and biodegradable additives, even rethinking some of the base polymer blends. It’s like fine-tuning an instrument: every small adjustment affects the overall harmony of the material.

What made it especially complex is that we couldn’t just optimize one property at a time. We needed all of them to come together with rigidity, elasticity, durability, and biodegradability, so the final material would behave like a high-performance plastic and meet our circularity goals. That’s where the real magic is in polymer engineering: balancing these competing demands until it all clicks into place.

Q: Were there any surprises during prototyping or testing?

Galy:

So many that’s the honest answer. In the early stages, we were experimenting with all kinds of blends: different biopolymers, additives, fillers, each chosen to tweak a specific property. Sometimes on paper, or even in the initial tests, it all looked perfect. We thought we had cracked it. Then we’d put it under real stress tests, and it would completely fail.

Maybe it cracked when it was supposed to bend or flex, or didn’t rebound the way a frisbee needs to. It was frustrating, of course, but also exactly where the breakthroughs happened. Each failure showed us something new about how the material behaved under load, or under environmental conditions like heat or moisture, which also resulted in development, which is always a valuable outcome. What’s interesting is that we actually started this frisbee project back in 2024, and it forced us to push our formulations much further than we’d planned. Without these specific challenges, we probably wouldn’t have explored some of the deeper optimizations that we now see are crucial. In a way, the failures were the best teachers. They pushed us to innovate and refine BioCir® X to a level that’s now more versatile and robust than we originally imagined.

As Einstein said “The more I learn, the more I realise how much I don't know”.

Q: What excites you most about this project?

Galy:

Honestly, it’s that this is Balena’s first real step into the sports industry and that’s such a universal space. A frisbee isn’t just a product; it’s something that crosses ages, places, cultures. My niece can play with it in the yard, my grandmother could toss it on the park, I grew up playing with one on the beach.

To see that familiar, joyful object now made from our material, something that’s bio-based and biodegradable, designed to safely return to nature, is really special to me. It’s like closing a personal circle. We’re not just creating technical polymers; we’re making products people build memories with. That’s what makes it more than just an R&D achievement; it feels meaningful on a human level.

Q: And what about the design itself?

Galy:

 It really wasn’t just any frisbee. We designed the mold completely from scratch, collaborating closely with our marketing team and industrial designers, mold makers and external partners to create something unique not just in material, but in look and feel too. Seeing the first prototype come off the printer was a special moment. It was like watching an idea we’d all sketched out finally come to life, and imagining how we’d share it with the world.

What I personally love most is thinking about what’s happening inside the material. Watching it stretch, bend, return to shape and knowing how the polymer chains are behaving on a microscopic level to make that possible. That’s the beauty of polymer science, looking at the picture on a micro level in order to understand what is happening at a macro level. Everything is connected, from the tiniest molecular interactions to the final product in your hands. And there’s always room to keep pushing, to keep improving. That’s what keeps me so excited about this work, it is truly my motto and makes me love what I do.

Q: What’s your next product to create next with BioCir® X?

Galy:

I’d love to make glasses for kids. You see so many children who need glasses from a young age, and often they only use them for a short period of time before their prescription changes or they grow out of them. Kids also love color; they want something playful, something that feels like them.

Imagine if those glasses weren’t just fun and durable, but also fully environmentally friendly. At the end of their life, instead of adding to plastic waste, they could safely break down or be recycled into something new. That’s the kind of circular future I get excited about  where even everyday products kids use growing up can be part of a cleaner system.

Q: What was the biggest thing you learned from developing the frisbee?

Galy:

Definitely the power of deep optimization. This frisbee project pushed us to refine BioCir® X in ways we probably wouldn’t have otherwise. We had to get very granular with the formulation exploring ratios, tweaking processing conditions, testing over and over. Because of that, we’ve ended up with a material that’s not only performing beautifully for the frisbee, but is also easier to process and more versatile for other applications. In a sense, the frisbee became a kind of proving ground that opened up new possibilities for where BioCir® X can go next.

Q: Tell us about the team behind it.

Galy:

I can’t say enough about them. Our R&D team is made up of people from all kinds of backgrounds, all bringing different perspectives and expertise. They’re curious and creative, they dig into the literature, they debate, they’re not afraid to challenge ideas and that’s what makes breakthroughs possible.If I had to describe them in one word? Perfect. Not because everything goes smoothly - it doesn’t! but because they’re great people with great minds who genuinely love solving problems together. That’s what drives the innovation here.

Ready to play with purpose

Balena’s first-ever bacteria-fermented frisbee isn’t just a milestone for us, it's a signal to the entire disc sports industry that true circular, high-performance products are no longer just an idea for the future. They’re here, ready to be thrown, tested, and loved by players of all levels.

For brands and manufacturers in ultimate, disc golf, and recreational play, this is your chance to lead the charge: to offer equipment that performs beautifully on the field and returns safely to nature when its game is done.

Ready to explore what BioCir® X can do for your next line of frisbees? 

Let’s build the future of sustainable play together. Get in touch to learn more.