You are here: Home Biotechnology Foundation Plants

Biotechnology Foundation:Plants

Mirel Bioplastics produced directly in plants will provide cost competitive, sustainable alternatives to the large volume, general purpose plastics now in prevalent use. Metabolix is developing the technology to enable this, producing Bioplastics in specific plant tissues, such as seeds or leaves, directly by photosynthesis using carbon dioxide and water as the raw materials.

Bioplastics produced this way will not only be low cost alternatives for many of the large volume plastics such as polyethylene, polystyrene, polypropylene, and PET now in use, but will also be sustainable raw materials for a number of important chemicals currently based on petrochemical sources, including C3 chemicals such as acrylic acid and 1,3-propanediol, and C4 chemicals such as 1,4-butanediol, THF, NMP, N-vinylpyrrolidone, and the like.

Although other groups have attempted to produce Bioplastics directly in plants, all have fallen far short of demonstrating an economic system. Metabolix is making significant progress in pushing the boundaries of metabolic engineering to produce Bioplastics in high yields directly in non-food, industrial crop plants.

In 2001, Metabolix was awarded a $15 million Industries of the Future cost-shared grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to help fund the development of a biomass biorefinery based on switchgrass. The goal of this five-year program is to produce Mirel Bioplastics in green tissue plants and, after polymer extraction use the residual plant biomass for fuel generation. The combined polymer and fuel production from a biomass biorefinery would reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil imports for both the materials and energy.