A New Gold Rush
When biotechnology is mentioned, people tend to think about the use of genetics to develop new medications and treatments of diseases or else in the transgenic varieties, which increase agricultural productivity. In economic terms, however, the greatest technological impact resides in the industry. McKinsey consulting estimates that by 2010 the industrial biotechnology world market will surpass 100 billion dollars. Just as a comparison, agricultural biotechnology should move 18 billion dollars whereas, medicinal biotechnology, 38 billion. McKinsey adds that biological products represent 5% of the earnings of the material industry, a sum which should increase twofold in the next six years. During a congress which was held last March in Florida, the specialists of 21 countries reached a consensus that bioindustry will have so much importance for the economy and the society as the computers had in the late 20 th Century. The main attraction is organic plastic, or bioplastic, which already promises a gold rush. “All the companies are developing plans to incorporate this new technology to their business models,” says Brent Erickson, vice-president of Biotechnology Industry Organization. According to specialist Daniel Burrus, author of the book ‘TechnoTrends,' bioplastic represents the beginning of nothing less than an Industrial Revolution. Many companies have already been trying to surf on this wave: The German company BASF, the Americans, DuPont and Metabolic Explorer and the Italian Novamont are developing plant and bacterium based plastics. The American companies Farm Fresh and Wild Oats, besides the Japanese Sony are packaging from fresh food to minidisks with corn plastic. Other companies, such as Eddie Bauer, Faibault Mills, Versace Sport e Armani, have manufactured clothes, accessories and blankets with Ingeo fiber developed by Cargill Dow from corn. In the Olympic games of Sydney 2000 and in the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, in 2002 the American company Biocorp manufactured thousands of corn glasses for Coca-Cola. In Brazil, the PHB Industrial, an association between two sugar mill groups from São Paulo, Irmãos Biagi, from Serrana, and Balbo, from Sertãozinho, has already built a pilot factory capable of manufacturing from 50 to 60 tons of plastic from sugar cane per year. Cargill Dow, a joint venture formed by Cargill, a giant in the agricultural sector, and Dow Chemical from the chemical area, is ahead in the gold rush. The company has invested 750 million dollars to bring to the market NatureWorks PLA plastic and Ingeo textile fibers, both derived from corn. Glasses, plates, bags, boxes, transparent films, clothes, blankets, pillows and mattresses are some of the products which are already available. PLA's potential has been acknowledged for a long time. It was first identified in the 1920's by the inventor of nylon, the American Wallace Carothers, who worked at DuPont. Carothers thought he could obtain petroleum based PLA, but failed. The hidden resourceful answer was only discovered almost 80 years later, when bacteria were used to extract the necessary acid from plants to produce PLA. The bioplastic is not as versatile as oil by-products, such as polypropylene, but instead of taking hundreds of years to degrade, PLA packaging disappears in weeks in the landfills. It can also be recycled or transformed into fertilizers. Cargill Dow invested 300 million dollars in a factory in Blair, in the American state of Nebraska, with a capacity to produce 140,000 tons of PLA a year. The competitors DuPont, Biocorp North America and Wilkinson Manufacturing are looking for similar products. However, one of the best cases of bioplastic manufacturing in the world is found in Brazil. PHB Industrial, from Serrana (a state of São Paulo) uses sugar cane to manufacture biodegradable plastic known as PHB or by the name Biocycle. It has similar properties to polypropylene and can be applied in plastic films, bottles, metal plates, resistant packaging or even medicine capsules. Every 6.6 lbs of sugar produce approximately 2.2 lbs of plastic. Compared to PLA, sugar cane plastic is more stable and resistant at higher temperatures. A commercial PHB unit, which is still being devised, forecasts a production of 4,000 tons a year. “We have closed partnerships with companies from Europe, the United States and Japan to develop products,” says Sylvio Ortega Filho, the coordinator of the project. Either in the form of PLA or in the form of PHB, the world production of bioplastic is still worthless. Adding the total capacity of all the forecasted factories by 2005, it will not be possible to meet not even 0.5% of the demand of 200 million tons of plastic consumed annually on the planet. To produce and to trade organic plastics can also cost fourfold more what costs those of oil by-products. But this does not discourage scientists, businessmen and investors. First of all, because the price of oil is the highest in the last 13 years, and will probably rise, in the long term. Second, because bioplastic still has no scale. “With greater use, there will be innovations which will reduce costs,” states Paulo Bellotti, an analyst from Stratus Investimentos. Bellotti is leading a recently created fund to invest in industrial biotechnology in Brazil. Besides recognizing the potential of bioplastic, he is betting on biodiesel, which has currently been undergoing tests at research centers. At the campus of the University of São Paulo (USP) in Ribeirão Preto, there are buses circulating which run on plant derived fuel. The federal government has created a program to add 5% of biodiesel to the 38 billion liters of oil which Brazil consumes a year. According to the government, this measure would represent savings of 350 million dollars a year in imports. Besides plastic, fuels are the main tangible fruits of the bioindustry. In Brazil, vehicles which have run on alcohol since the 1970's – today, they represent not more than 5% of the industry's sales, but ethanol is part of the composition of all Brazilian gasoline. Today, other countries are starting to reproduce this model. At the end of April, the Canadian company Iogen started to sell ethanol derived from wood, wheat or corn. According to Burrill & Company, a specialized consulting company in biotechnology, the residues which come from American agriculture would be enough to produce 300 billion liters of alcohol a year, or 25% of the gasoline consumption in the country. In the state of Minnesota alone, there are 80 bioethanol plants. Four decades ago, few people were able to foresee that countries such as Canada and the United States would be inspired by the prosaic Brazilian alcohol program. For those who are skeptical, Bellotti from Stratus remembers a sentence from Sheik Yamani, one of the founders of OPEC: “Stone age finished before stones did and Oil age will finish before oil does.” |
