‘Green’ chemists swap oil for renewable alternatives

Look around you. What do you see? A computer screen, the print on this page, a pen, your shirt. Chances are there’s petroleum in all of it. Petroleum-based substances are in everything from lipstick to laundry detergents, clothes to computers to chocolate bars – even fertilizers and pharmaceuticals. Five percent may not seem like a lot, but it’s still 1 million barrels a day, more or less. That’s enough to demand the attention of a new generation of industry and academic scientists who are working to find natural, nontoxic alternatives to petroleum for consumer products. They have dubbed their field “green chemistry.”

“The industry wants drop-in technologies,” says John Warner, director of America’s only doctoral program in green chemistry at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. “The product has to be something that in every way looks and feels the same – so that’s the challenge.” Substituting for the petroleum used in plastics, however, is a relatively new science. To make conventional plastics, oil must be broken down into constituent monomers, which are then reconstituted into polymer chains (plastics). Scientists have now mimicked this process with corn starches, creating a new polymer called polylactic acid (PLA).

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