Mycellium has almost mystical significance to some greens, but as Eben Bayer of ecovative design notes in this TED Talk, it can also be used to make a biodegradable packaging material called "mycobond" from a variety of different types of waste biomass, thus eliminating the need to make materials like styrofoam from fossil fuel inputs - Eben Bayer: Are mushrooms the new plastic ?.

Product designer Eben Bayer reveals his recipe for a new, fungus-based packaging material that protects fragile stuff like furniture, plasma screens -- and the environment.

Eben Bayer is co-inventor of MycoBond, an organic (really -- it's based on mycelium, a living, growing organism) adhesive that turns agri-waste into a foam-like material for packaging and insulation.

I'm not sure if this is truly a form of bioplastic, but I'm going to count it as a variety of green chemistry. Apparently Dell is going to use this in some of their packaging, so it is gaining some traction already.



You can view the growth process in this video - and unlike most plastics used in packaging, it is fire resistant.

The SMH has a look at the progress being made by bioplastic company Plantic - Fantastic as plastic gets organic.

A revolution in green packaging is being launched from a head office in Altona, as leading British retailer Marks & Spencer has announced that this Christmas its entire Swiss chocolate range will be sold in an innovative Australian company's biodegradable plastic trays.

Plantic Technologies' cutting-edge bioplastic, also called plantic, is made from starch and is not only 100 per cent compostable but also completely dissolves in running water.

It's a pretty neat trick, which has enabled the company founded in 2003 to open sales offices in Germany, Britain and the US, and employ about 50 people worldwide. The global biodegradable plastic packaging market it wants a slice of is estimated by British analyst Visiongain to be worth $US1.6 billion this year.

Helen Roberts, head of packaging at Marks & Spencer, says: ''This is a fantastic step forward for food packaging. We know our customers really want to be responsible, and using plantic means they can enjoy a delicious box of chocolates without the worry of what to do with the leftover tray - they can just throw it on their compost heap.'' ...

Plantic's technology, which involves the use of industrial starch with film-forming properties, was developed from research into plastics by an Australian federal government-funded research group, the Co-operative Research Centre for International Food Manufacture and Packaging Science, involving experts at Swinburne University, the University of Queensland and the CSIRO.

Morris says the research was built on Australia's ability to add value to agricultural crops. ''We don't take the whole crop,'' he says.

''When our starch is produced we take a portion: another portion goes to animal feed; another to compost or fertiliser, so the whole crop is used. There's no waste.''

The fact that the strain of corn used is non-genetically modified has been a big plus in the European market, while the company has also recently expanded its US presence, signing an exclusive distribution deal with Klockner Pentaplast, which is one of the world's leading manufacturers of rigid plastics.

GreenBiz.com has an article looking at some of the characteristics of various bioplastics - The Material Facts About Bioplastics.

Our recent webcast, "A New Life for Plastics: End-of-life Solutions in the Age of Greener Materials," drew a sizeable audience -- and a sizeable number of questions. We only were able to address a handful of them during the webcast, so we asked the three participants -- William Hoffman, environmental scientist in green chemistry at UL Environment; Robert Whitehouse, Director of Applications Development for Metabolix, Inc., a leading bioplastics company; and Kelly Lehrmann, consultant with the German bioplastics firm FKuR -- to respond to some of the remaining questions.

Here are their thoughts on the benefits of bioplastics, the differences among various biobased plastics, the role of municipal waste agencies in creating a composting infrastructure, and other things. ...

What is the best benefit from a bioplastic: the biodegradability or the renewable source reducing the carbon footprint?

William Hoffman: Not all bioplastics are biodegradable. Braskem (Green PE) and PolyOne (ReSound) both produce biobased materials which are not biodegradable. Ultimately, the "right" answer to this question would depend on the application for which the material is designed (and the end-of-life associated with that application). Let's say the material is to be used in a durable application, perhaps an appliance housing where that part needs to last the life of the appliance (approximately 10 years), then biodegradability is not an ideal characteristic. On the other hand, if the material is used in a disposable packaging application, biodegradability would be a desirable characteristic of the end-product since so much single-use plastic packaging end up in landfills.

Robert Whitehouse: The best benefit is a bioplastic that is both biobased and biodegradable. As an example, Mirel™ bioplastics is made from annually renewable resources, corn sugar, and is biodegradable in a wide range of environments including natural soil and water environments, in home and industrial compost facilities where available, and anaerobic digestion. The combination of biobased and biodegradable helps to reduce reliance on petroleum and can help to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills or incineration.

What about anaerobic degradation in a closed landfill?

WH: Once a landfill is closed, the conditions that encourage biodegradation – recirculating leachate, which carry microbes and elevated moisture levels are removed. Indeed, closed landfills resemble the "dry tombs" that William Rathje studied in his Garbage Project in the 1970s.

RW: Landfills are typically unmanaged with regard to microbial activity and so degradation is very difficult to predict. Managed anaerobic degradation facilities typically take from 20 to 50 days for organic carbon conversion.

Todd Woody has an article at Grist on a green chemistry company - Taking the petro out of petrochemicals.

You can buy green jeans, green greens (at the farmer's market), and green beer. But the reality is that many, if not most, products in our industrial society contain some petroleum-based chemicals.

In fact, up to a quarter of the oil consumed in some regions of the United States -- such as on the Gulf Coast -- goes into petrochemical production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. A number of startups, however, are working to develop green chemicals that take the petro out of petrochemicals and eliminate the environmental and safety hazards from manufacturing industrial chemicals.

A couple of years ago I wrote about one of those companies, a San Diego startup called Genomatica, that had developed a green version of a chemical compound called 1,4‐butanediol, or BDO. Your skateboard wheels, sneakers, golf balls, and a host of other products are all made with the chemical, whose manufacture alone is a $3 billion business.

At the time, Genomatica, which was spun out of the University of California, San Diego, in 2000, had only produced batches of BDO in the lab. The startup's scientists had bioengineered a microorganism that eats water and sugar and spits out BDO. Goodbye hydrocarbons, hello carbohydrates. The microorganisms are designed and tested "in-silico" -- in other words, on computers, which also simulate chemical production.

Last year, the company, which is backed by top Silicon Valley venture capital firms Mohr Davidow Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, announced that it had also bioengineered a benign version of an industrial solvent called methyl ethyl ketone, or MEK. Better yet, Genomatica planned to produce MEK in shuttered ethanol plants.

On Tuesday, Genomatica executives said they had successfully moved from the lab to small-scale production, producing 3,000 liters of BDO in a pilot plant.

Technology Review has an article on "renewable rubber" - Rubber from Microbes.

Working with Goodyear, biotechnology company Genencor has been engineering bacteria that make isoprene--the chemical used to make tire rubber--from sugars derived from biomass. But ramping up microbial production of isoprene to such a scale that it can compete with petroleum-derived rubber has proven to be a major challenge.

Yesterday at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco, researchers from a Palo Alto, CA-based research division of Genencor described further modifications to the metabolic pathways of the microbes that improve the yield of bioisoprene. The company will decide on plans for building a bioisoprene pilot plant next year.

Microbes including E. coli naturally make small amounts of isoprene as part of their metabolism, but not nearly enough to be used on an industrial scale. To improve the yield, bioengineers at Genencor, which began working on bacterial systems for producing isoprene in 2007, initially made changes to two metabolic pathways that converge to create an isoprene precursor. But yields were still low because the bacteria's existing genetic machinery takes a meandering path to create isoprene from this precursor. In the most recent results, the company added to the E. coli a plant gene coding for isoprene synthase, an enzyme that converts the precursor directly into isoprene.

Isoprene, which is a gas at room temperature, bubbles out of the cells without damaging them, then out of the fermentation broth. Genencor senior director of business development Rich Laduca says that with no refinement, this system can produce 99 percent pure isoprene gas. Purity is critical because trace contaminants can foul the catalysts used to polymerize isoprene to make synthetic rubber. Goodyear has used Genencor's bioisoprene to make synthetic rubber, which it then used to make several prototype tires.

"We're looking for renewable resources to reduce our dependence on foreign oil," says Jesse Roeck, director of global materials science at Goodyear. Roeck says the isoprene work is still a research project, but that the chemical may be in tires on the market in three to five years.

Earth911 has an article on making tires using orange oil instead of crude oil - New Tires Made of Oil from Orange Peels.

Tire manufacturer Yokohama is now selling a model made with 80 percent non-petroleum material, substituting orange oil as the primary ingredient to make vulcanized rubber.

The new tire is called the Super E-spec™ and has already received the Popular Mechanics Editor’s Choice Award in 2008. Yokohama will initially market the tire for hybrid car models such as the Toyota Prius.

“The eco-focused dB Super E-spec mixes sustainable orange oil and natural rubber to drastically cut the use of petroleum, without compromising performance,” Yokohama vice president of sales Dan King said. “It also helps consumers save money at the gas pump by improving fuel efficiency via a 20-percent reduction in rolling resistance.”

Orange oil is considered sustainable because it is produced from a renewable resource. The same philosophy of reducing petroleum use is utilized in producing plastics from corn starch or vegetable oil.

Yokohama has yet to release the environmental impact of disposing these tires, which typically provides an environmental concern. The petroleum in traditional tires can burn for months in a landfill and is difficult to extinguish. These fires also release black smoke and toxins into the air. Yokohama has not specified whether the orange oil will biodegrade over time.

The process for recycling tires involves devulcanizing the rubber, which would essentially remove the oil and extract natural rubber. Because this is an expensive process, used tires are often shredded and turned into playground surfacing or additives for the soil in sports turf. It can also be reused as artwork.

Joel Makowevr has an interview with "Cradle to Cradle" pioneer Bill McDonough at Greener Buildings - Bringing Green Design to the Mainstream.

Joel Makower: Bill, one of the things you talked about is the fact that recycling or when we recycle, we're simply recycling a lot of the problems that we've already created -- and yet there's opportunities to take some of the products in the waste stream and turn them into less toxic products. Tell me about that.

William McDonough: Well, if you look at the, you know, use of materials which are questionable like PVC or even PET in our water bottles that contains antimony as a residue from a catalytic reaction, we're realizing these are suboptimal products in a Cradle to Cradle world where we would want everything safe and healthy by design. So, when we look at something like PVC, we say, "Well, why can't we park that somewhere until we figure out what to do with it?" When we look at PET, we wonder why we can't bring it back and actually scrub out the antimony and put it back into the marketplace refreshed and clean, so we're essentially what we call up-cycling it. When we look at recycling, we see that typically things are either down-cycled and they're losing quality in the process of being reused or they're recycled and they come back in the same condition effectively or we can up-cycle things and actually purify them and clean them up on their way back through the cycles, so we're excited about the prospect of up-cycling plastics.

JM: Well, why not just create a whole new plastic all together? Why go through all this?

WM: Well, I think in the long run we're gonna need to take advantage of all the feedstocks that are out there and use them effectively. I mean otherwise we'd find ourselves developing strategies to, say, burn the plastics that exist out there that are suboptimal, but when you go burn antimony-laden PET, what you get is antimony trioxide in the air, which is a known carcinogen, so is burning it gonna be the solution? I don't think so. So, you know, what we really want to do is actually put these things back into useful cycles and so we need transitions to the future. We won't be able to do this overnight. ...

JM: So there's all these new sort of design or at least materials, protocols and materials categories, I guess, that are coming out and I'm wondering -- where does it all come together? So, for example, there's biomimicry. There's green chemistry. There's Cradle to Cradle. First of all, is there much of an overlap among those? Biomimicry is not a material; it's a discipline. .. Because ultimately if you're a designer you want a whole toolkit to choose from.

WM: Yeah. Well, I think all those tools are sympathetic. I mean, if you look at biomimicry, which is such a, you know, fabulous way to think about approaching problems, it gives you an inspiration and it gives you touch points and reference points and sort of miracles that you can connect to, the miracles of the world around us. But, you know, you could be designing a product that is unsafe that looks like something that nature might have done in terms of its physical characteristics, in terms of its attributes in the world. It's something that would walk on ceilings but drops bombs, you know. I mean, so a tool only has a value based on the intention and the purpose to which it's put, so when we look at biomimicry, for example, I mean it should be celebrated for all the joyful aspects of its characterization of the world as an inspiration, so that fits really beautifully.

When we look at other systems, green chemistry works perfectly with Cradle to Cradle because Cradle to Cradle incorporates green chemistry. Cradle to Cradle also incorporates this idea of biological and technical nutrition as two distinctions for product development. It includes renewable energy or includes clean water, and it includes social fairness, which, you know, it may not be inherent in green chemistry, per se. So, I think they're all sympathetic with each other and they all fit together as a kit, so, you know, we encourage people to think in biomimicry terms. We encourage them to think in green chemistry terms and we encourage them to think in Cradle to Cradle terms simultaneously.