Costs do matter of course but get anywhere close and you will have a mandated market in which consumer products in particular will fit. We all want plastic that in the long term cannot truly survive. Today we have plastic that loses its integrity in about twenty years but still resists biological breakdown. Thus we have floating plastic dust in the ocean.
We want to know that that can be made impossible or at least short lived. It is obviously a difficult problem but the winner will own the plastics market thereafter.
This is actually great progress and should start showing up soon enough.
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New production process makes PLA bioplastic cheaper and greener
Researchers in Belgium have developed a simpler process for the production of PLA bioplastic
(Credit: Shutterstock)
Polylactic acid (PLA) is a biodegradable bioplastic that is
already used to produce a variety of everyday items, such as cups,
trays, bowls and vegetable wrapping foil. Unfortunately, the current PLA
production process is expensive and produces waste. Researchers at the
KU Leuven Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis in Belgium have now
developed a new production technique that is cheaper and greener and
makes PLA a more attractive alternative to petroleum-based plastics.
PLA boasts a number of advantages over petroleum-based
plastic. It is one of the few plastics suitable for use in 3D printers,
it is biocompatible, making it suitable for medical use, and it
biodegrades in a few years in certain environments, and is industrially
compostable and recyclable. But when it comes to cost, PLA can't compete
with petroleum-based plastics due to the intermediary steps required to
produce it.
As its name suggests, lactic acid is a main building
block of PLA. This can be obtained by the fermentation of sugar that can
be sourced from renewable resources such as corn starch, tapioca and
sugarcane.
"First, lactic acid is fed into a reactor and converted
into a type of pre-plastic under high temperature and in a vacuum,"
explains Professor Bert Sels from the Centre for Surface Chemistry and
Catalysis. "This is an expensive process. The pre-plastic – a
low-quality plastic – is then broken down into building blocks for PLA.
In other words, you are first producing an inferior plastic before you
end up with a high-quality plastic. And even though PLA is considered a
green plastic, the various intermediary steps in the production process
still require metals and produce waste."
To develop a more efficient and economical route to PLA,
the researchers have borrowed a petrochemical concept that uses a
zeolite (a porous mineral composed of aluminium, silicon, and oxygen) as
a catalyst in the reactor to guide the chemical process that converts
lactic acid into lactide.
"By selecting a specific type [of zeolite] on the basis
of its pore shape, we were able to convert lactic acid directly into the
building blocks for PLA without making the larger by-products that do
not fit into the zeolite pores,” said postdoctoral researcher Michiel
Dusselier.
In practice, this means the intermediary steps that
require metals and produce waste are eliminated from the production
process, while providing higher yields of lactide. A patent for the new
technique has already been bought by a chemical company that intends to
scale up the production process to an industrial capacity.
While admitting that biodegradability isn't a desirable
property for all plastics, (toilet drain pipes, for example), and the
team isn't aiming to promote disposable plastic, Dusselier says that
products that are made from PLA have the potential to become cheaper and
greener thanks to the this new technique.
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