Plastic goes the corn-sugar way

VITHAL C NADKARNI

[ FRIDAY, JULY 05, 2002  1:12:20 AM ]
Cornucopia is a word that Patrick Gruber likes a lot. It isn’t surprising. The word means ‘horn of plenty’ and the tall, blonde-bearded chemist from Minnesota-based Cargill-Dow Corp has created a cornucopia himself—the world’s first new synthetic fibre in 40 years—starting from nothing but fermenting corn sugar.
Called ‘NatureWorks PLA’ or polylactic acid, Dr Gruber’s award-winning plastic is turning up in a growing array of products, from Sony mini-disc wrappers and Coco-Cola cups to babies’ diapers and wedding gowns.
Dr Grubber is in India on a short visit to promote the technology, which is also being developed to use renewable agricultural waste and other crops such as wheat and sugar beet. During an exclusive interview, we asked him about the market prospects for his corn-born plastic in a global bazaar crowded with petroleum-based products like polythene and polystyrene.
‘‘Sustainability is my one-word answer,’’ he replied. ‘‘Conventional plastics made from petrochemicals drained from zillion-year-old oil deposits are the very antithesis of that. Even more attractive are the new polymer’s unique range of performance attributes.’’ Dr Grubber is chief technology officer and vice-president of a joint venture between Cargill, one of the world’s largest grain merchants, and Dow Chemicals, which is the world’s largest chemicals producer.
Unlike fairy tale transformations that turn straw into gold or frogs into princes, Dr Gruber’s process is based on a pragmatic chemical insight—fermenting corn sugar into lactic acid and vaccum distilling and polymerising it into a plastic—which came as a bolt from the blue to the scientist in 1989.
Fresh out of graduate school, he had been hired by the Cargill bosses to find new uses for corn. For months, his group tried dreaming up new syrups, fuels and acids, but nothing held greater allure than bio-degradable plastic.
The green plastic can be made using the existing infrastructure with minor tweaking. It also requires 20 to 50 per cent less fossil resources to make than petroleum-based plastics. And because carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere in growing corn, the overall greenhouse emissions are lower than comparable conventional plastics.
Times of India
Bombay