Were they remaking the 1967 film "The Graduate" today, the one word of career advice to young Benjamin Braddock from an older family friend would no longer be "plastics." It would be "biotechnology."
At a factory in Nebraska, Cargill Dow, a joint venture of the agricultural giant Cargill Inc. and Dow Chemical Co., is making a plastic and fiber material called Ingeo from corn. In turn, Ingeo is being used to manufacture food packaging and blankets. In North Carolina and Illinois, DuPont Inc. is using corn to produce a new fiber for clothing and carpeting called Sorona.
This is the start of something big. The production of fibers and plastics from natural substances promises to be a major step forward for the chemical industry, a break with half a century of practice.
Executives speak of it in missionary tones. "This is a move toward sustainable development for the chemical industry," says John Ranieri, head of DuPont's Bio-Based Materials business unit. The advantage of using renewable resources, Ranieri explains, is enormous: "No net new carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere."
It may not be generally known, but the familiar products that find their origins in the chemical industry -- from plastic forks to plumbing systems, from food wrapping to designer clothing -- have building blocks made by transforming the carbon molecules of oil and natural gas.
But when companies work with petrochemicals, carbon dioxide becomes a waste product -- and a huge source of global warming. By contrast, plants such as corn and soybeans grow by combining carbon dioxide, sunlight and water. They form a closed loop in which carbon dioxide recycles into the creation of new plant life. So when plastics are made by taking the carbon out of corn and other crops -- a complex procedure involving the manipulation of enzymes -- there is no waste to worry about.
There is, then, a noble purpose behind the research that has led to Ingeo and Sorona. Yet make no mistake: The DuPont and Cargill Dow projects are business ventures, not philanthropic or public relations exercises designed to impress environmentalists and regulators.
The great mass of chemical industry products that once were wonders of technology -- polyethylene, polyester, propylene and others -- have long become commodities in oversupply around the world. It is hard to make a profit simply by turning out more of them.
