In the latest of a series of major government and corporate initiatives to use biotechnology and biological feedstocks for industrial processes, chemical giant Dow (Midlands, MI) has announced a new Oilseed Engineering Alliance (OEA)—a $10 million project to develop new strains of crops that will produce starting materials for manufacturing plastics and other products. However, new research suggests that “green” biomanufacturing could be muddying the environment.
Under Dow's alliance, scientists at Dow, Michigan State University, the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, and several other institutions will collaborate to develop better feedstocks for bioplastics manufacturing. Synthesizing polymers from renewable feedstocks, like sugars and oils from crops, eliminates the need for nonrenewable petroleum-based starting materials, and in recent years, researchers have improved the efficiency of fermentations and developed genetically engineered plants to produce more chemically useful precursors (Nature Biotechnology 16, 1022, 1998). Instead of extracting simple sugars or naturally occurring oils from ordinary crops and then chemically modifying them, companies now aim to produce materials from genetically engineered plants that synthesize nearly complete plastics, simplifying the manufacturing process.
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