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Wood Chips into Plastic
Going Green
Going Green: Wood Chips into Plastic
You know this may look like ordinary plastic, but it isn’t. In fact, it comes from wood chips. Now we’re here in the lab of Dr. Jim Nakas at SUNY-ESF and he’s going to explain how in fact we get from wood chips to this.
The idea here is to use renewable resources in a microbiological setting where we can grow certain types of bacteria on wood sugars derived from normally available tree species in the northeast.
If you treat wood chips under a certain regime of high temperature and high pressure you can extract wood sugars. Every species of wood species has a certain percentage of wood sugars present.
Feed those sugars to different types of bacteria and you can produce different types of polymers.
There have been occasions that we’ve all been into the physicians office and been examined for example for ear infections using what is known as an otoscope and you put a plastic tip on an otoscope and that has to last about five seconds and then by law it has to be removed and discarded.
It wouldn’t be that much of a leap of faith to look at this and say it could become the lid to a coke from McDonalds, how long does that have to last after it’s placed on the cup? Five or ten minutes. All of these materials will degrade ultimately to CO2 and water as the only end product in a time frame roughly of six to ten weeks.
You know this is exactly the kind of thing we’re trying to prevent. We all know these fossil fuel based plastics last for hundreds of years in our landfills and create a tremendous eyesore along sidewalks and along our streets throughout our communities. Fortunately the work going on here at SUNY-ESF, one day wood-based plastic like materials may resolve all of those issues. I’m Terry Ettinger for Going Green.
