In Depth August 14, 2008, 5:00PM EST

I Have Just One Word for You: Bioplastics

(page 3 of 3)

Jason Grow

Peoples hopes to grow his plastic in plants such as switchgrass and oilseed Jason Grow

says Carmen Scholz, a chemistry professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who studies such materials. "If it weren't profitable, no one would lay a hand on it."

Total global production of bioplastics is still minuscule. All the manufacturers combined will generate only about 1million tons a year by 2010, analysts say, compared with 500million tons a year of the petro-based variety. But these ordinary plastics, which account for up to 10% of total U.S. oil consumption, are quickly becoming an extravagance at $138 for a barrel of crude. A switch to bioplastics not only would help reduce oil dependence but also could save companies and consumers serious money. With Dow Chemical hiking the price of its plastic products by up to 20% on June1, some types of bioplastics from Cereplast and others already cost less. If oil stays high, bioplastics could capture 20% of the global plastics market in as little as five years, predicts Jeff Bishop, an independent analyst at Beacon Equity Research in San Francisco. "It's a no-brainer where customers are going to gravitate," he says. John Pierce, DuPont's head of biosciences, calls bioplastics "an opportunity we measure in the billions of dollars."

Mirel is aimed at the premium niche. It will cost more than $2 a pound, vs. under a dollar for commodity bioplastics. And it has some serious backing. Around 2004, with the jump in yields from the company's cell cultures, food and chemical companies suddenly began returning Peoples' phone calls. Metabolix negotiated a partnership with agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), which wanted to supply feedstock for cell cultures. Peoples doggedly held out for a 50/50 split of future revenues. As part of the joint venture, ADM pledged in 2007 to build a $200million factory in Clinton, Iowa. It will crank out 55,000tons of Mirel a year starting in early 2009. John D. Rice, ADM's vice-president in charge of the partnership, says: "Our hope and dream is for it to be very successful."

Having proved his science is valid, Peoples wants to scale up production of Mirel without relying on food crops such as corn. Funded by the U.S. Energy Dept., he's trying to bioengineer switchgrass and other plants to produce the plastic in their leaves. If he can pull it off, Metabolix could reap billions of pounds of bioplastics on just a fraction of the acreage currently given over to corn. It'll be a challenge, but Peoples, ever the scientist, says: "The stuff that is easy to do is not that interesting."

Links

A Plastic Pacific

Google "garbage island" and check out a growing ecological catastrophe called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Featured on CNN, it's a "massive stew of unwanted waste" twice the size of Texas in a remote area of the Pacific, northeast of Hawaii. The fast-growing patch was discovered in 1997 by Captain Charles Moore, who founded the nonprofit Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, Calif. He reckons bits of plastic now outnumber plankton in many parts of world's seas.

Der Hovanesian is Banking editor for BusinessWeek in New York .

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