New partnership aims to make raw fabrics for greener bioplastics
In fact, the soybean car built from what is now called bioplastic. Robert Boyer, the chemist who led the project, estimated that to produce a million of those cars, the Ford Motor Company would want 100,000 cotton bullets, 500,000 wheat bushels, 700,000 soybean bushels and 500,000 corn bushels.
World War II stifled Ford’s bioplastic project. But today’s customer cars have plastic bodies. However, these shells, like almost all grocery shopping bags, peanut packaging, toothbrushes and other debris that suffocate the ocean, are made of oil, plants.
Plastics are carbon-based fabrics that can be molded in almost any shape. Whether company or flexible, they are all made of chemicals that come together to shape the ultimate substance.
The first plastics to be invented were made from chemicals extracted from plants. But in the twentieth century, subtle oil is the choice of raw curtains, allowing the creation of nylon, Teflon, polyvinyl chloride and countless complex artificial curtains.
Consumers are now beginning to recognize the damage inherent in petrochemical plastics. Bioplastics offer an exciting alternative, but they are not necessarily greener. As Boyer pointed out, the manufacture of bioplastics requires many agricultural land. If these fields are used to grow parts, they will be used to produce food. This tension between the carbon load of agriculture and the carbon benefits of bioplastics has tainted the promise of many bio-based materials, adding many bioplastics today.
Lygos and Praj come in.
This month, India-based Praj Industries and California-based Lygos announced a partnership to create a new raw organic bioplastics product. The couple will use yeast to prepare lactic acid, a precursor to bioplastic polylactic acid or PLA.
PLA is an established replacement for many petrochemical plastics discovered in cups, bags and other non-unusual items for the customer. It is completely biodegradable and has even been used within the human frame in the form of surgical screws and disappearing sutures.
As I have written about before, Lygos specializes in training microbes to do the hard work of manufacturing. Through microbial production of malonic acid and other chemicals, Lygos aims to disrupt the use of petrochemicals in the automotive and manufacturing sectors.
As a component of this new component, Praj will leverage its expertise in procedural development, optimization, scale design, and additional integration lactic acid as a PLA source.
“Our more than 3 decades-old industry in the environment, energy and agribusiness complements global efforts to mitigate climate replacement and is in line with the global circular bioeconomy,” Pramod Chaudhari, Praj’s chief executive, said in a statement.
“We are pleased to marry Praj and the Praj Matrix team, whose in-depth experience encompasses the commercialization, engineering and scale, structure and operation of similar business processes. This is an exciting time when global demand for sustainable and unsupply products from poisonous oil continues to grow,” said Eric Steen, CEO of Lygos.
Surprisingly, you are informed that a third of the approximately 30,000 portions of a vehicle are already made of plastic, as Nexant reports. About 39 other types of plastics and polymers are used to make a car, and almost all come from petrochemicals.
But unlike petrochemical processes, biofabrication can be used to make chemicals with molecular precision, designing plastics with greater functionality than we can extract from oil. (Inspired by spider silk, which is 340 times more powerful than steel, Japanese artificial biology company Spiber uses a strategy to produce high-functioning artificial polymers not only for automobiles, but also for medical devices, construction, sports, aerospace, furniture, and robotics.)
If corporations like Lygos can take off bioplastics, we can not only realize Henry Ford’s vision of more affordable and fuel-efficient vehicles, but we can also introduce a guilt-free plastic world.
Follow me on Twitter on @johncumbers and @synbiobeta. Subscribe to my weekly biology newsletters. Thank you to Ian Haydon for the additional studies and reports in this article. I am the founder of SynBioBeta, and some of the corporations I write about are sponsors of the SynBioBeta convention and the weekly summary. Here is the full list of SynBioBeta sponsors.
I am the founder and CEO of SynBioBeta, the leading network of innovators, investors, engineers and thinkers who represent a pastime for artificial biology to build a
I am the founder and CEO of SynBioBeta, the leading network of innovators, investors, engineers and thinkers who represent a pastime for artificial biology to build a larger and more sustainable universe. I publish the weekly newsletter SynBioBeta, presents the podcast SynBioBeta and writes “What is your biostrategy?”, The first eBook that hopes to know how artificial biology will alter virtually every sector of the world. I am a spouse and operating investor in DCVC’s hard-generated investment fund and have been concerned about several new companies. I’m a former bioengineer at NASA and I got my Ph.D. In Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University. I’m from the UK