Canada: Industries turning to soy, fibres

By Becky Rynor, Canwest News Service

It was Henry Ford, the American founder of the Ford Motor Company and a prolific inventor, who did some of the earliest work in developing biocomposites -- products that combine organic fibres from agriculture and forestry waste with petroleum-based materials such as plastic.

"He was at the forefront," says Ed Trueman, with JER Envirotech of Delta, B.C.

"If you go back to the early days of Henry Ford, in the late teens and early 1920s, he did an awful lot of development work with soy-based products -- soy-based plastics, soy-based polymers that actually ended up in auto body panels. He was brought up on a farm and he was very concerned about the environment."

Ford was stymied in getting biocomposites widely developed and accepted, Trueman says, by the technological limitations of the time and the ready availability of cheap petroleum.

But recent advances in technology, combined with industry's desire to reduce costs and be environmentally conscious, is moving the field forward,says christian Belanger with the National Research Council.

Belanger says this has a growing number of industries looking at biocomposites for everything from food packaging to car and airplane components.

"It is an extensive area of research," he says. "We've been working over the last three years, for example, on a material that is made out of starch. We've been developing a mix of biopolymer, which is polylactic acid, which is made out of corn. We use that plastic that we mixed with the starch that you would buy in the food stores, and develop new types of materials that are biodegradable.

"One of the goals is to use this material for food packaging, plastic wraps, cups, trays."

The NRC and JER Envirotech recently teamed up to develop wood-plastic composite materials that mix organic fibres from agriculture and forestry waste with new or recycled polymers, such as polyethylene or polypropylene.

"The challenge was taking anything that is a bio-fibre, like a wood product, and marry that with a polymer which is basically a hydrocarbon, a plastic," Trueman says.

"The technology challenge was how to get the moisture out of the fibre because, like oil and water don't mix, polymers and moisture don't mix."

The result is a green alternative that offers the best characteristics of both wood and plastic -- better rot resistance and greater stiffness. The product is then sold in pellet form to plastic processors, who turn it into commercial products.

"We're in many markets today -- transportation, construction, consumer goods. We're in toys and we make products with very high loading levels of fibre that may be headed for some inefficient disposal or burning or bio-fuel," Trueman says.

"We add sustainability and we reduce cost. We reduce the amount of plastics being consumed, and we certainly affect the amount of waste fibre and waste wood that may be headed for some inefficient use."

Source: http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=0bc61d97-1545-420...