Plants to Replace Oil in Plastics?
Filed Under: Green Politics, Green Technology on January 4, 2010
The idea of using plant oils to replace the petroleum normally used in plastics is not really new, but it’s still an emerging technology that isn’t quite there yet. Some plant oils, such as hemp seed and other “soft” oils are well-suited to light plastics such as those that make up the non-durable pieces of your dash board, water bottles, and so forth. Heavier plastics require other types of oil base, such as those that can be produced with some strains of algae. So far, however, there are few types of plastic that can’t be replaced with biological equivalents.
Most of the attention regarding how we use petroleum (crude oil specifically) is aimed at fuels, such as gasoline and diesel. While these are a large portion of what a barrel of oil is used to make, they are not the only thing crude is made into, with a lot of each barrel being used to make plastics: from consumer packaging to automobile dashboards to high-impact plastics for industrial use. We use a lot of plastic.
If you were to look around you right now, you would probably see at least a dozen (likely more) products whose primary makeup is plastic. Cell phones, the computer you’re reading this on, your beverage container, your lamp, the electrical outlet it plugs into, your shoes… Plastics are everywhere in our society. Yet they are one of the least-recycled trash items we produce – and we produce a lot of trash.
Back in October, I talked about the different types of plastics and how they are or aren’t recyclable in Know Your Plastics. In my booklet The Sustainability Factor, I talk about how much garbage we produce and how much of that is plastics that will literally sit in landfills for centuries. Many of the plastics made from biological sources are biodegradable, usually by exposure to sunlight, brackish water, specific (non-toxic) chemicals, or other simple, relatively cheap methods.
The problem right now is prices. Oil is heavily subsidized by both government here and abroad. Oil producing countries (or whomever they’ve leased the oil fields to, which is more often the case) often have heavy subsidies in which the oil is paid for in part through taxes. It happens in the same way that many agricultural subsidies are paid to force prices of some foods lower than their real market value. Corn is a great example of that. Many oil-producing countries or the countries from which the ships which haul the oil are subsidized through various government handouts or corporate deals involving futures investing. All of this means that the price of a barrel of oil is kept relatively low.
So competing technologies, such as Coreplast’s bio-based plastics made from starches from corn, tapioca, potatoes, etc., aren’t able to gain market share. The owner of that company, Frederic Sheer, is waiting for oil to reach $95/barrel, at which time his product becomes viable. He’s banking on that happening around 2013. He’s been waiting 20 years for that to happen. Cereplast is based in California and Indiana and holds several patents on bio-plastics processes.
“The day where we hit $95 a barrel,” says Sheer, “I think all of a sudden you’re going to see bio-plastics
basically explode.”
Until then, we’re still watching petroleum dominate this market. Plastics are currently a $1 billion market in the U.S. alone and have the potential of growing to ten times that over the next decade. The world market is $2,500 billion currently.
Until oil gets re-priced at its real value, most of the things we see, including plastics, will continue to be petroleum-dependent. This is true of most of our major commodities, especially here in the U.S. Corn will continue to be the (crappy) base for our ethanol fuel until we stop subsidizing corn.
This is the primary reason why I keep promoting the idea of not using government to “subsidize” or “promote” or “kick-start” anything: new “green” technology or not. In the end, it only gets in the way of innovation and moving forward.
