| American Scientist: Bioplastics Boom |
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Although the plastics industry has depended predominantly on petrochemicals for feedstocks throughout most of its history, some early plastics were plant based. Parkesine, the first human-made polymer, was created by inventor Alexander Parkes in 1856 out of chloroform and castor oil. Henry Ford unveiled the now-legendary "soybean car," with soy-based plastic body panels, in 1941. Now, as the price of petroleum rises and concern mounts about the environmental effects of petrochemicals, the plastics industry is racing to create renewable polymers from bio-based sources. At the ninth annual Bioplastics Conference, sponsored by European Plastics News and held last December in Cologne, Germany, the Brazilian petrochemical company Braskem received the top honor in the second Bioplastics Awards. Braskem announced last summer that it has developed a "green polyethylene" sourced entirely from sugarcane—a natural choice given that Brazil is the world's largest producer of sugar. Despite the recent bioplastics boom, this is the first time a substance exactly equivalent to petrochemical polyethylene has been produced from nonfossil sources. "What's taken everybody by surprise," says John Williams, technology-transfer manager at the U.K.'s National Non-Food Crops Center, "is the speed of development" of this material. "If you look back a few years, estimates put the development of polyethylene from nonpetrochemical sources at 2020." Bookmark this page!      |
| Source: | americanscientist.org |
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