Plastics have a huge carbon footprint: producing at least 100 million tons of carbon emissions annually from this oil-based material.Now, a U.S. research team has invented a cheap way to make plastic from sugar and corn cob. This plastic can be produced at a sufficiently low cost that one day it may one day replace the most common plastic, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) in the world. Food bags, soda bottles, and even Polyester cotton contains PET.
For decades, oil was the raw material for almost every plastic - from polyethylene to propylene - but the oil crisis of the 1970s led researchers to look for alternatives to using plants rather than oil to make plastics, and DuPont and other chemical companies Progress has been made, but scientists are continually looking for bio-based alternatives to PET, and the most promising is the polyethylene high foam (PEF). Researchers use renewable energy to successfully develop PEF One of the main ingredients, furan dicarboxylic acid (FDCA), however, is costly.
To this end, Jim Dumesic, an engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his team set about finding ways to reduce costs. Ten years later, they found that the key to achieving this was a solvent called γ-valerolactone (GVL). GVL is a non-colored liquid that can be obtained from renewable energy sources such as corncobs etc. When Dumesic and colleagues added GVL and an organic acid catalyst to water, they added fructose, a complex of fructose, Sugar in corn syrup turns into an organic compound that acts as a precursor to FDCA Because GVL behaves so well that the Dumesic team can produce large amounts of pure FDCA with only a small amount of fructose.
New research co-author Ali Hussain Motagamwala, a chemical engineer at the University of Wisconsin, said the new approach addresses three issues of plastic production: first, it makes use of renewable carbon sources rather than fossil fuels, and secondly, it makes use of renewable energy sources Attempts at FDCA require the use of corrosive acids and expensive reaction vessels that are not required by the new method.Fourth, scientists can use the final product FDCA as a reaction catalyst and recycle the GVL solvent, which reduces costs compared to existing methods and Save energy. 'The latest approach made the process greener.'