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News from the North Platte Bulletin:

The state of Nebraska is sending half a million dollars in Community Development Block Grant funds to the small town of Laurel.

The money will aid a local start-up company with infrastructure costs, according to a statement from Gov. Dave Heineman’s office Thursday.

Laurel BioComposite, the beneficiary of the CDBG, is a producer of bioplastic enhancer that will bring 20 jobs to town of under 2000 people.

“Nebraska’s biotechnology industry is growing and I’m pleased to congratulate everyone involved in this new start-up company,” Heineman said. “Creating new jobs opportunities in this and other growth-oriented industries is important for Nebraska’s economic development.”

In addition to CDBG funding, the city of Laurel will provide $340,000, and Laurel BioComposite will provide more than $18.3 million to help complete the project, for a total investment of more than $19 million. The project includes a $14 million facility used to turn distillers’ grain into plastic.

A second site planned for later development includes an ethanol plant utilizing fractionation technology to produce 50 million gallons of ethanol a year

Administered by the Nebraska Department of Economic Development, federal CDBG funds are made available to the state from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Keeping up with the news about bioplastics can sometimes feel like an endless stream of press-releases about new partnerships, new "promising" research, and new business collaborations.  What can get lost in the river of details is the fact that these announcements are all usually driven by the same underlying motivation.  All of the businesses know "where the money is" in bioplastics, and it is in answering a single underlying question:  what is the perfect combination of A + B + C?

Let me explain.

As an educational site about bioplastics, we have emphasized again and again that bioplastics are created by a combination of three types of ingredients: one or more types of polymer (like starch or poly-lactic acid), one or more types of plasticizer (like glycerol), and one or more types of additives.  You vary the kinds and amounts of each of these three things to get plastics with different properties.  This is why it's so easy to make basic bioplastics at home, like our do-it-yourself article on how to make algae bioplastic explains.  You just have to make sure you have the three basic ingredients: A + B + C.

But for the big manufacturing companies, the key is to find the perfect combination of ingredients to have exactly the perfect desired set of properties.  It has to be strong, it has to be heat-resistent, it has to look good.  For some applications, it has to bend without breaking; for other applications it has to be solid and inflexible.  Unfortunately, this involves balancing a number of different factors.  Much of the time, an additive that will make a bioplastic stronger will also make it less biodegradable, or will be derived more from non-renewable resources, so that the "green value" of the plastic is decreased.  The big money and big research opportunities in bioplastic right now are in coming up with the ideal recipe for bioplastics that balance all of these requirements.

And sure enough, that is what they are doing.  For example, recently in the news there have been reports about the U.S. Department of Agriculture chemist William J. Orts and a team of collaborators being hard at work figuring out what needs to be added to poly-lactic acid (PLA) to allow it to be more heat-resistant. 

Similarly, all of the recent media fuss over NEC's plastic based on cashew shells was really about the problem of balancing the need to keep the materials in the plastic green and the need to have a final product that has the right properties.  As observed in one article, the big breakthrough that NEC was responsible for was finding a particular combination of polymer and additive that allowed the resulting plastic to (simultaneously) be based primarily on renewable non-food resources, be biodegradable, and be heat-resistent enough to use in electronics. 

So when you are scanning the news for talk of bio-plastics (as we do here at green-plastics.net) you should keep this "theme" in mind.  Most of the research announcements and big business collaborations are focused, in one way or another, around this one very fundamental question:  what is the perfect combination of ingredients we need to combine to get the perfect combination of properties in our plastic?

Midcromidas, Inc. has turned its green eye on wastewater, and it is seeing gold. The company has developed a strain of microbes that can convert the carbon in wastewater into PHA (polyhydroxylalkanoate), a high performance plastic. PHA biodegrades quickly in compost piles and landfills, but otherwise it behaves the same or better than conventional petroleum-based plastic. It resists water and odor permeation, and it holds up under high temperature and exposure to sun. As a sustainable alternative to petroleum as a plastics feedstock, wastewater could be setting the gold standard.

Using municipal wastewater virtually guarantees a steady supply of feedstock rich in carbon from human waste. Aside from the potential for long term price stability and potential for managing global warming through carbon sequestration, the many advantages of wastewater-to-bioplastics over petroleum include easing pressure on landfills, converting a municipal waste disposal liability into a marketable asset, reducing the amount of petroleum-based plastic in the waste stream, and virtually eliminating environmental disasters related to oil spills and accidents. Add the logistical and job-creation advantages of siting bioplastic manufacturing facilities near the feedstock source, and it's a no-brainer.

This is a biodegradable plastic that seems to have all of the upsides of well-known bioplastics, but is made from waste, instead of corn or potatoes.

Pay special attention to the list of benefits of this kind of plastic. A lot of people who argue against bioplastic want you to think that the only thing bioplastic has to offer is that it is biodegradable. This is far from the truth.

Meet Variety Global Business Group, or VGB Group for short. VGB Group is a collaboration project between John Pitre (CEO) and John Lin (President), entrepeneurs from the United States and China (respectively) who are working together to create and distribute corn-based vacuum-formed dinnerware and other bioplastic products.

According to a recent press release, John Pitre has been visiting various communities in the U.S. looking for sites to build 9 new plants for producing their bioplastic products.

Although VGB is based in Houston, it is working together with Dongguan Honghao High-New Technical Development Co. to expand its technology to North America. Dongguan Honghao opened in 2000 to manufacture food containers from biodegradable corn starch, and to sell its turnkey production lines to other companies that also want to make products from bioplastics.

So keep an eye out for this new company, another place you can buy bioplastic products.