14 DAY TRIAL // Oil has been used to produce all plastic products for decades, and its supremacy in doing so has never been challenged, until now. Experts at Dow Chemical say that they found a way of using sugarcane to produce the plastic compound polyethylene at low cost.
Alternative methods of producing materials equivalent to plastic (such as from hemp) have been around for years, but the costs associated with using these technologies are simply too large to make them feasible at the large scale.
But the researchers behind the new method say that their approach costs roughly the same as creating plastic out of oil. The company is already building a production plant in Brazil, to test out its green manufacturing technique.
Construction efforts are scheduled to begin later this year. Dow is working together with Mitsui to develop the new, 240-million liter ethanol facility. The joint venture seeks to have the plans needed for the plant ready by early 2012.
Engineers say that the ethanol produced by plants in the new installations will be converted into hundreds of thousands of metric tons of polyethylene via a relatively cheap process, on par with what the petrochemical industry can achieve today.
At this point, only about 7.7 percent of the entire chemicals market is made up of bio-based chemicals. In spite of achieving massive growth rates over the past few years, the industry is still reluctant to accept substitutes for oil-based plastics.
“The dehydration process for converting ethanol to ethylene has been known since the 1920s. The only thing that's really new here is the scale,” explains Luis Cirihal, who is the director of renewable alternatives and business development for Latin America at Dow.
According to the official, the Brazilian plant will have a polyethylene production output comparable to that of a standard petrochemical plant. It will also exceed a conversion efficiency of 200,000-ton sugarcane-to-polyethylene.
Interestingly, the new plant will partially run on electricity produced from the biomass leftover by the sugar-production process. This will help keep the costs of operating the installation as low as possible, while also protecting the environment, Technology Review reports.