Pre-prototype · Materials research
Every mouthguard in the game tonight is made of petroleum.
The standard material for sports mouthguards is ethylene vinyl acetate — a thermoplastic refined from crude oil. It is worn for a season, it wears out, and then it has nowhere to go. BioShield Athletics is a student-founded materials startup working to replace that feedstock with a plant-based one.
No prototype yet. No product for sale. Not incorporated.
The evidence
Three things that are true before we build anything
EVA
the industry standard
The ADA's own standard for mouthguards describes three categories, all of them typically made of ethylene vinyl acetate. EVA is a thermoplastic copolymer derived from petroleum.
Source: American Dental Association — American Dental Association — Athletic Mouth Protectors (Mouthguards) (opens in a new tab) · IntechOpen — Systematic Study of Ethylene-Vinyl Acetate (EVA) in the Manufacturing of Protector Devices for the Orofacial System — IntechOpen (opens in a new tab)
82–93%
less likely to be injured
Mouthguards work, and that is exactly why this matters. The ADA reports that mouthguard users are between 82% and 93% less likely to suffer dentofacial injuries. Nobody should stop wearing one. The question is only what it is made of.
2×
the risk without one
A 2019 systematic review cited by the ADA found that people who did not use a mouthguard had more than twice the risk of orofacial injury. This is a product millions of people are told to use and then throw away.
The hard part
You cannot just make it out of something compostable
A mouthguard has a real engineering job. It has to absorb and spread impact energy, soften at a temperature low enough to be fitted in boiling water, hold that shape against heat and saliva, and be safe to keep in a mouth for hours a week. EVA is the incumbent because it does all of those things cheaply and at scale.
Most materials marketed as compostable fail at least one of those tests. That is the actual problem, and it is why a credible answer starts with the feedstock rather than with the end of life. We would rather solve a narrow problem honestly than a broad one on a poster.
Our approach
Change where the carbon comes from, not what the material does
Our lead candidate is bio-based EVA made from sugarcane. The polymer is chemically the same as the EVA used today, so it performs the same way and runs on the same tooling — a manufacturer does not need new machinery to use it. The difference is upstream: the carbon in the material is pulled from the atmosphere by a crop instead of pumped out of the ground.
This is not hypothetical chemistry. Sugarcane-derived EVA is already in commercial production and already used in footwear by brands including PUMA and Native Shoes. Nobody has brought it to mouthguards.
Source: Braskem — Braskem — I'm green EVA in PUMA footwear (opens in a new tab)
Stating it first
What we are not claiming
A judge is going to ask these questions, so here are the answers before the questions:
- We have no prototype. We are at the research and material selection stage. Nothing has been moulded.
- We have no protection data. We will not make a single safety or performance claim about a BioShield mouthguard until we have tested one. The injury figures on this site describe mouthguards as a category and are linked to their sources.
- Bio-based EVA is not biodegradable. Because it is chemically identical to fossil EVA, it behaves identically at end of life. It is a feedstock improvement, not a disappearing act, and we explain the limits of that on the Impact page.
- We are not a company yet. BioShield Athletics is not incorporated and has nothing for sale.
Where we are
The honest roadmap
Complete
Problem research
Material landscape, injury literature, and end-of-life review.
In progress
Material selection
Screening bio-based feedstocks against five criteria. We are here.
Not started
First prototype
Not started. Needs a material decision and a moulding partner.
Not started
Athlete testing
Not started. No performance claim gets made before this.
Watch us try
We send an update when something actually happens — a material decision, a first mould, a test result, or a failure worth writing up. No schedule, no marketing.