ask our experts about
your home-made bioplastic project!

From Medical Daily:

Dutch researcher Jean-Paul Meijnen has come up with an environment friendly method of transforming biowasts into bio plastics, an environment friendly substitute of plastics by training bacteria to convert glucose content in the food wastes into bioplastics.
Click here to find out more!

“Unfortunately, the production of plastics from bio-wastes is still quite an expensive process, because the waste material is not fully utilized,” explains Jean-Paul Meijnen. 'A logical way of reducing the cost price of bioplastics is thus to 'teach' the bacteria to digest xylose and arabinose too.'

Check out the whole article here:

http://www.medicaldaily.com/news/20101122/4053/scientists-train-bacteria-to-make-bioplastics.htm

The website greenbiz.com recently published an article called "Improved Standards Needed for Bioplastic Claims."  The gist of the article is just what the title says: there is a lack of standards for biodegradable plastics, and that causes problems.

But to anyone who is new to the field and interested in learning more, this leaves open a whole host of questions.

• Who creates standards? Who enforces them?
• How are standards actually measured?
• What do these standards actually define, anyway?

This article will give a brief answer to each of these questions, and point you in the right direction for finding out more. It will also highlight an important conclusion: The big problem in the "green plastics" industry today isn't a lack of standards; it is the misuse and misunderstanding of existing standards by producers, consumers, politicians and the media.

Plastic is going into landfills in enormous amounts. There are many possible long-term solutions to this problem: some people advocate recycling, while others believe that using plastics that can be composted is the only sound environmental solution. These ideas are important to pursue, but they do not deal realistically with the immediate problem of waste disposal. Millions of tons of plastic waste are carted off to landfills each year, and remain there for an indefinite period of time. We need to find a solution that deals with this reality as it is today, not how we hope it will be in 10-15 years. We need a realistic solution that can be implemented right now, that will make the plastic that is going to the landfills disappear....

AZO CleanTech just published a very well-written science article about some of the science behind biofuels and biopolymer technology.  They specifically spend some time talking about the chemistry underlying "furanics", a type of material made up of a particular type of organic compound (furan) that can be derived from sugars and other carbohydrates, but most importantly can be made from non-food sources.  They talk about this in the context of biofuels, but this article is a good read for anyone who is interested in learning about the chemistry behind bioplastics, as well.

Why? Consider this: NatureWorks and Avantium, two leaders in the field of sustainable materials, announced last year that they are starting to work together on a research project that could lead to a new type of bioplastics.  And it is based on furanics.

A little background: Avantium has been working for some time now with furanic materials.  Initially, Avantium tried to develop this material as a biofuel, but this was met with limited success.  They successfully were able to test it as an engine fuel, and even had prototype cars running on it in Brazil.  However, it is too expensive to go into wide use as fuel in motorcars (about US$1900 per metric ton), and the processing can be expensive and difficult (although Avantium has invested a lot in a special Furanic Processing Plant).

So what is the next step for this bio-material?  Since both have biopolymers as their foundation, it is only natural to make the intuitive leap from biofuel to..... bioplastic!

NatureWorks, of course, has been hugely successful in developing a wide range of end markets & products for its Ingeo(TM) biopolymer, and so is teaming up with Avantium to see what can be done with furanic material.  It is still exploratory, but of course they are optimistic:

"We believe it is incumbent on us to investigate tomorrow's potential solutions beginning today," said Marc Verbruggen, president and CEO of NatureWorks. "For example, development of NatureWorks Ingeo(TM) biopolymer began in the 1990s. Avantium's work to date is impressive, and we look forward to a productive joint collaboration."

Will this be the Next Big Thing in bioplastics?

There is a great deal of confusion about the term “bioplastic”. Some believe that the definition of bioplastic means biodegradable plastic. Some people think that bioplastics will automatically "melt" when exposed to water.  There is a tendency to lump many of the new green plastics under the same umbrella: bioplastics, biodegradables, etc.  These leads to the media using a number of terms as if they were interchangeable: “eco-friendly”, “green”, “compostable”, “biodegradable”, “degradable”, “bioplastic”, etc. But these terms are very different when looking at them from a scientific perspective.

Bioplastics in a technical sense are simply plastics created from the use of a biological feedstock: the starch from corn, potatoes, grass, trees, or other living or once living material. Biodegradable plastics, on the other hand, are defined scientifically as “…when the degradation is the result of naturally-occurring micro-organisms such as bacteria, fungi and algae.”  As it turns out, creating plastic from biological feedstock (“bioplastic”) could result in plastics that are biodegradable, compostable, or even non-biodegradable like the traditional plastics like we see on the market today!

In a long and interesting article about the use of databases in genetic engineering, bioplastics get a special mention:

Toyoda is also a member of the RIKEN Biomass Engineering Program, which was initiated in April 2010. Through the program, Toyoda aims to improve the efficiency of producing bioplastic materials based on rational genome design methods for plants. Genome design methods and programs collected through GenoCon would also be used for that purpose.

I fear this will drive some environmentalists crazy, bringing together an idea they stereotypically love (the idea of green plastics) and an idea they stereotypically hate (genetic engineering).

But as a scientist, my question to you is: why are so many environmentalists so scared of genetic engineering? There are some very good ecological arguments for genetic engineering, and now we can add one more to the list:  the production of better, stronger, cheaper biodegradable plastics.

I would like you to read a pair of articles, and think about them in relation to eachother.

First is a recent study that estimates that...in theory up to 90 % of all plastic products and plastic consumption could be replaced by bioplastics. In theory. Of course, we're not even close, and won't be for a long time. But if you take the "long view", we know that at least in principle we can use bioplastics for a vast majority of the things we use plastics for.

How close are we? Enter a second article that claims that the demand for bioplastics should rise to 900,000 metric tons in 2013. The most important driver, according to the study, is an expected continuation of high prices for crude oil and natural gas.

Of course, nobody can predict the future, and there is always a "conservative" and an "optimistic" view.

According to an article posted on ecochamber.com,

California-based company Cereplast has revealed that it is developing breakthrough technology to transform algae into bioplastics, and predicts that it could replace 50% or more of the petroleum content used in traditional plastic resins.

According to Frederic Scheer, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Cereplast, "Based on our own efforts, as well as recent commitments by major players in the algae field, we believe that algae has the potential to become one of the most important green feedstocks for biofuels, as well as bioplastics."

Polystyrene. It's those firm, oddly-shaped foam pieces that fit around the computer or television when you first take it out of the box. It can be used to make plates and cups. (You can find a fun introduction to the material here.)

In one of its forms, it looks like tiny puffy white beads pressed together into a solid, hard shape. And normally, those tiny puffy white balls are made from petroleum.

But what if they weren't?

Gregory Glenn and Simon Hodson have developed a new technique for processing starch plastic that yields an end result much like polystyrene foam.

According to the article, the process works generally like this:

1. A standard plastic resin extruder is used to heat and mix starch and other all-natural compounds.
2. The extruder squeezes out long strings, called "thermoplastic melt,"
3. These strings are later cut into small beads about half the size of a marble
4. The beads are put into the cavity of a heated mold to press them into the desired shape
5. The heat mold process causes the beads to puff and expand until they press against eachother, creating a strong matrix that's much like the bead matrix of polystyrene foams.

When you compost your PLA plastic products, you are working to create a closed "cradle to cradle" loop for the material:

1. Corn, processed to make...
2. Lactic Acid, polymerized to make...
3. PLA, which is used to create
4. PLA Products, which are
5. Used, and then
6. Disposed of, when it is
7. Composted, returning to the soil to grow more
8. Corn.... go to #1

This is a pretty long loop (and also inefficient, from an energy perspective).

One way to shorten this loop would be to recycle, as we do with regular plastics:

1. Corn, processed to make...
2. Lactic Acid, polymerized to make...
3. PLA, which is used to create
4. PLA Products, which are
5. Used, and then
6. Recycled, where it is
7. Mashed up into PLA... go to #3

This is "mechanical recycling". The problem with this is, PLA doesn't recycle as nicely or easily as regular plastic. There are difficulties with getting a nice-looking, pure product.

So what can we do? LOOPLA (by Galactic) has a possible answer: chemical recycling.

The LOOPLA process can provide a major short-cut that increases the efficiency of the cradle-to-cradle PLA loop:

1. Corn, processed to make...
2. Lactic Acid, polymerized to make...
3. PLA, which is used to create
4. PLA Products, which are
5. Used, and then
6. Sent to a LOOPLA plant, where it is
7. Broken down into Lactic Acid, go to #2

Although this process is still cutting-edge and in its experimental and testing phase, it promises to provide a real answer: it promises to be cost efficient, and provides a mechanism that will allow us to keep re-cycling the same feedstock around and around... each time producing PLA products that are exactly the same quality as products made from virgin PLA.