From sugar water to Spandex

Someday, your Spandex tights and car dashboard may be made out of sugar cane rather than petroleum, if start-up Genomatica succeeds on its plans.

The San Diego-based start-up on Tuesday said that it has reached a technical milestone in converting sugar--derived from sugar cane or beets--into an industrial plastic called 1,4-butanediol, or BDO. It's a material that's appeals to the auto, apparel, and pharmaceutical industries for a variety of uses.

Coaxing little bugs to do some heavy lifting.

(Credit: Genomatica)

Genomatica uses a genetically modified strain of E.coli bacteria to convert sugar water into BDO through fermentation. On Tuesday it said it demonstrated that it can remove impurities from that fermented brew to make a 99 percent concentrated version of BDO.

"We're using a process that will continue to allow the overall economics of making BDO from sugars to be cost advantaged," said Genomatica CEO Christophe Schilling. "Not only do we purify it, but we purify it in a way that will allow us to use technologies known to scale."

Schilling said that at the current price of sugar and $50-per-barrel oil, the process is 25 percent cheaper than petroleum-based BDO. The cost advantage will attract customers, which are also interested in finding a plant feedstock that has a less volatile price than oil, he said.

The company plans to build a demonstration facility next year that will produce about one ton of BDO a day. A commercial-scale operation would 20 to 100 times larger.

Biological-based chemical manufacturing is poised for greater adoption in part because of volatile fossil fuel prices and because consumers are demanding products made from renewable materials, Schilling predicted. He noted that DuPont is using a fermentation-based process to make 1,3-propanediol (PDO), another industrial plastic.

If successful with its demonstration facility, Genomatica expects to license its technology to other chemical manufacturers.

Schilling said the company has plans for making other chemicals, using a suite of software modeling tools that speed up discovery of ways to manipulate microorganisms to make a desired product.

[MrZook]

I was buying bottled water that used corn-derived polymer for the bottles. The quality of the bottles was lacking (the seams would spring little holes!). Hopefully this 99% pure BDO will hold up well to manufacturing conditions.
Wonder what they are using the rest of the sugar cane for?

[AmbientShadow]

This. Is. Awesome. Who would have thought horrible bacteria + plant = plastic!?

[tech_crazy]

Not news at all. There have been bio-degradeable plastics made for decades using bacteria. Even a milk protein like caesin has been used for decades.

[pbradleyii]

Finally a use for all that sugar cane that is just growing wild and going to waste every year...

[tech_crazy]

I hope there was sarcasm in that!

[Joe Real]

This is just one application of biotechnology, which is not really new. We have used microbes to do our bidding for us, from older than written history such as making beer, wine, food, and then continually refined to making exotic foods, soluble fibers, cellulose, complex sugars, simple sugars, hormones to medicines. We are just starting to give emphasis to fuel and now the building blocks for making plastics and other polymers.

[Seaspray0]

How about the stuff found inside twinkies?

[tech_crazy]

Great! As if ethanol was not enough to be made out of food crops (corn, sugarcane) and now we have this. I am in favor of using bio-degradable/renewable materials. But do these folks realise that using food crops is only going to serve to increase food prices and create even more of a food shortage.

Maybe they could read this UN article aptly titled "How the rich starved the poor". A copy can be found at
http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2008/04/food-prices-lynas-biofuels

[Thranx]

a critical point to be sure. Reducing global supplies of corn has increased the price of everything from beef to tortillas... which means we westerners get all the food and the poor countries aren't able to afford the food, and recieve less in aid because of the increased costs.

Food, not fuel.