Plastic and Fuel that Grow on Trees

Scientists have long dreamed of finding a way to replace crude oil as the root source for plastic, fuels and other industrial and household chemicals with environment-friendly alternatives. Recently, researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory made a major advance by converting a ubiquitous sugar to a primary building block for fuel and polyesters. Z. Conrad Zhang and colleagues devised a way to convert glucose, nature's most abundant sugar, into hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a promising surrogate for petroleum-based chemicals. The most abundant source of glucose is plant biomass.

"Getting a commercially viable yield of HMF from glucose has been very challenging," Zhang said. "In addition to low yield until now, we always generate many different byproducts making product purification expensive and uncompetitive with petroleum-based chemicals."

For more information, read the complete article at http://www.pnl.gov/news/release.asp?id=255