Midcromidas, Inc. has turned its green eye on wastewater, and it is seeing gold. The company has developed a strain of microbes that can convert the carbon in wastewater into PHA (polyhydroxylalkanoate), a high performance plastic. PHA biodegrades quickly in compost piles and landfills, but otherwise it behaves the same or better than conventional petroleum-based plastic. It resists water and odor permeation, and it holds up under high temperature and exposure to sun. As a sustainable alternative to petroleum as a plastics feedstock, wastewater could be setting the gold standard.

Meet Sunyuan Bioproducts, Ltd, a manufacturer of bioplastic products for food services.

It's not a big company: 120 workers, 10 researchers. Think of them as a small "specialty shop" dedicated to doing one thing, and doing it right: bioplastic cutlery.

You can order items in corn-starch (PLA), plant-starch (PLM) or sugarcane. You can order utensils, plates, bowls, trays, and clamshells in various shapes and sizes. The products are heat-resistant up to 100 centigrade, and they even take custom branding requests if you want a logo added for your company or event.

And they are all certified ISO14851, OK Compost, EN13432, and Non-GMO certificate. These are real bioplastics: biodegradable, compostable, and made from renewable resources.

Meet Variety Global Business Group, or VGB Group for short. VGB Group is a collaboration project between John Pitre (CEO) and John Lin (President), entrepeneurs from the United States and China (respectively) who are working together to create and distribute corn-based vacuum-formed dinnerware and other bioplastic products.

According to a recent press release, John Pitre has been visiting various communities in the U.S. looking for sites to build 9 new plants for producing their bioplastic products.

Although VGB is based in Houston, it is working together with Dongguan Honghao High-New Technical Development Co. to expand its technology to North America. Dongguan Honghao opened in 2000 to manufacture food containers from biodegradable corn starch, and to sell its turnkey production lines to other companies that also want to make products from bioplastics.

There are probably of a lot of small or medium-sized manufacturing companies that have entertained the notion of using bioplastics, but simply don't know where to begin. How can they find out what types of bioplastic will meet their needs for their products? And how can they find out there to buy it?

Enter: The Material Data Center. This online (and free) database with extensive information about plastic materials has just recently opened up a new section: the Biopolymer Database.

Search by polymer, manufacturer, or grade, and you can browse property data sheets for hundreds of materials, getting information ranging from color to tensile strength, from storage requirements to barrier properties. And you can then find out who makes it and how to get it.

Andrea Siebert-Raths, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences in Germany, is giving a presentation at the Biopackaging from Feedstock to Waste Stream conference in London to discuss some of the planned improvements to the database.

The new database (or "the next generation" database, as she calls it) will have at least two important improvements over the current version. First, the University will be performing all of their tests of different materials in house (currently, their numbers rely on industry data), in order to make sure that database users are seeing a true "apples-to-apples" comparison when they evaluate different bioplastic materials. Second, new search features will be added, so that you will be able to specify properties (such as heat resistance or tensile strength) and find materials that meet your specific needs.

Now another article has been opining that bioplastics have to be cheaper and better before they will fill more than "niche" applications. (We saw another one of these recently, as well.)

I could be wrong, but I honestly believe these people just don't get it.

They say,

"In the short-term, the cost of biopolymers will limit them to niche applications. Although the performance of some biopolymers like polylactic acid (PLA) can match their petroleum-based counterparts, these materials cost nearly twice as much, as long as oil is below $100/barrel."

I'm not going to say price isn't a factor--especially the economy being what it is these days. But every single article I see that talks about the "limitations" of bioplastic act like the ONLY factors in people's behavior are price and performance: The performance has to be as good as regular plastics, and the price has to be as cheap.

I just don't think that's the case. I think the relevant factors are price + performance + prediction.

People are not stupid. They KNOW petroleum-based products will not stay at the price they are at now. They know this resource will eventually run out. They know it will also have other impacts on the environment. These are not relevant factors for all consumers... but they aren't completely IRRELEVANT for most consumers, either.

Or maybe I'm too much of an idealist?

I was reading an article in plasticnews.com called Iowa State harvesting bioplastics. It sounded pretty much like a typical fanboy article, expressing enthusiastic intent more than actual progress. There was a lot of talk about "Our driving forces" and "If researchers at Iowa State University have their way..." and so on.

But a quotation at the end caught my attention, from assistant professor David Grewell:

"We tell our students all the time that our products can't be 1 cent more expensive than current materials. There was a lot of interest last summer when oil was near $150 [per barrel], and some of that has continued through a government emphasis on bio-preferred products. But oil has to be above $70 for bioplastics to be competitive."

Oil has to be above $70 for bioplastics to be competitive. Maybe I'm too much of a liberal (or not enough of a libertarian?), but I just don't understand why this has to be this way. And I'm enough of an idealist to think that it doesn't.

According to a survey conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies:

Half of the respondents to the survey said they would "definitely" or "probably" pay 15% more for eco-friendly clothes detergent (51%) or for an automobile (50%). Forty percent said they would spend 15% more on "green" computer printer paper and 39 percent would do the same for "green" wood furniture.

A controversy was ignited yesterday after industry association European Bioplastics (EB) publicly denounced claims made by the oxo-biodegradeable (OB) industry as "misleading" and "free of substance".

The Oxo-Biodegradable Plastics Association (OBPA) hit back by saying its products were superior and EB had gone on the attack in a bid to protect its market share.

EB issued a position paper distancing itself from the OB sector, saying there were "serious concerns amongst many plastics, composting and waste management experts that these products do not meet their claimed environmental promises."

Evlon's key ingredient is corn, a renewable field crop that provides starch, converted to sugar, then fermented to form lactic acid. The lactic acid is converted into a lactide molecule using heat, then the lactic acid molecules are polymerized to form PLA, or Ingeo, provided to BI-AX by NatureWorks.

BI-AX employs a proprietary process to turn the PLA into manufactured film -- the raw material for printable packaging including gift bags, health food and produce wrappers, candy wrappers, snack food bags, DVD and CD wraps, rigid cosmetics containers, labels, folding cartons and more.

Swedish packaging paper manufacturer Billerud AB has announced it plans to acquire Tenova Bioplastics.

Tenova Bioplastics, based in Norrkoping, Sweden, manufactures compostable carrier bags made of bioplastic. The company is the Swedish market leader with annual sales of SEK 35 million (about $4 million).

Per Lindberg, CEO of Billerud, says,

"Bioplastic will be a good complement to paper for renewable packaging, and in the long term the combination of paper with barriers made of bioplastic will be a highly attractive alternative for many different types of packaging. Tenova is a leader in the rapidly expanding bioplastic field, which provides Billerud with a platform for the future."

At present, bioplastic is primarily made of polylactic acid or starch mixed with compostable polyesters. The material is biologically degradable and compostable. If it is burnt it generates less carbon dioxide over its lifecycle than oil-based plastic. Tenova's products include carrier bags, waste and compost bags, and can be used as a barrier in packaging for food and hygiene items.

Schulman said Cereplast's families of bioplastic resins will be offered to customers interested in more environmentally-friendly solutions. This partnership hopes to accelerate the adoption of bio-plastics in Europe, said Jerome Raphanaud, senior vice president of Cereplast Europe.