From Bioplastic to Biodiesel | Green Energy News

March 23, 2007 – Vol.11 No.52

FROM BIOPLASTIC TO BIODIESEL.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, the country recycles 32 percent of its waste. About 99 percent of lead acid car batteries are recycled as are 50 percent of all paper, 34 percent of all plastic soft drink bottles, 45 percent of all aluminum beer and soft drink cans, 63 percent of all steel packaging, and 67 percent of all major appliances.

Those figures seem pretty good given that Americans’ favorite pastime is consuming, not saving and preserving. Certainly we could do better. Ninety-nine percent of everything should be the goal. Let’s take a look at the lowest figure in the the group, the recycling rate for all plastic soft drink bottles - 34 percent - to see what can be done.

Perhaps the low rate of recycling for plastic has something to do with recycled plastic’s seemingly low rate of demand in new products. Sure there are some fibers, and thus fabrics, made from empty Dasani (tm) bottles. The seat fabric in Ford’s next generation Escape is made of recycled plastics, for instance, and I’ve got a hat in my closet made from similar stuff. There are other products certainly, but it’s not that obvious what they are.

Maybe there’s another way to increase the recycling rate of plastic bottles: change what they’re made of and use them as a source of fuel; biodiesel to be specific.

Polytechnic University, in New York, has bioengineered a fuel-latent plastic that can be converted into biodiesel. The plastic, made from vegetable oils, is tougher and more durable than typical polyethylenes. After use, a bioplastic bottle made from it can be placed in a simple converter where enzymatic action will break down the bioplastic into biodiesel that can be used for running vehicles or in home heating systems, for instance.

The next step for Polytechnic is to develop a more efficient low-cost process for both manufacturing the bioplastic and converting it into biodiesel. With that step the University will get help in the form of $2.34 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). According to DARPA the military generates a substantial amount of waste plastics. If that plastic can be converted to fuel in the field, the less fuel it will need to bring to an operation. (Getting rid of the waste is an added benefit.)

Researchers think that the same process used in the battlefield could also be used in the home: Waste soda bottles could be turned into fuel at the point of disposal such as your garage (Recycling centers could also have bioplastic to biodiesel converters.)

The commercialization of bioplastics to biodiesel brings up another question. If biodiesel is made from vegetable oils, wouldn’t converting vegetable oils to plastics first, then to biodiesel, reduce the overall, full cycle energy consumption related to biodiesel production? That is, vegetable-oil-to-bioplastics-to-biodiesel could have a smaller carbon footprint than vegetable-oil-to-biodiesel and vegetable-oil-to-bioplastics-done separately. The former low-carbon scenario may have less impact on agriculture and food supply than the latter as well.

Polytechnic University's National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Biocatalysis and Bioprocessing of Macromolecules (CBBM) developed the new bioplastic. DNA 2.0, a biotechnology company specializing in gene synthesis, helped develop the enzymes that can both synthesize and break the fuel-latent plastic down into biodiesel after its use.

Visit Polytechnic University at http://www.poly.edu/ DNA 2.0 at http://www.dnatwopointo.com/