Bottle from the sugar cane field

More and more people are turning their attention to renewable resources to seek sustainable development, such as plants. This shift is not as obvious as changing the plastic bottle into a glass bottle when drinking water. Instead, it uses plants to produce a certain kind of raw materials, uses the raw materials to produce plastics, and then finally processes the bottles into the hands of consumers. This change may not be intuitive to consumers, but it does indeed change life and society.

The fast-moving consumer goods industry, which has a huge demand for packaging materials, has already made such a plastic product, a plant environmental protection bottle. In practical use for several years, it has performed excellently. As mentioned above, it is not a bottle made from plants, but a source of plants.

Drink bottles, different from plants

Traditional plastic beverage bottles are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). No matter from which point of view, PET is an excellent material: good transparency, lustrous, high strength, acid and alkali resistant grease, temperature range from -70°C to 150°C... In industry or in everyday life, it has a wide range of uses. If you mention PET's other ID "polyester fiber," you may just be familiar, but if you mention it's common name you must be very familiar with, that is the famous "polyester."

For more than 70 years, PET's two raw materials, terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol, came first from the coal industry and later from the oil industry, all of which are firmly tied to non-renewable resources. The cost of sacrificing natural resources is not small. Although PET can be recycled and reused, there are statistics showing that most beverage bottles do not go this way, not to mention PET used in textiles and other fields. This has prompted scientists to focus their attention on a type of resource that is never lacking and is very cheap on the earth—plants. In a kind of plant environmental protection bottle that is now mature and commercialized, ethylene glycol comes from plants, so that the proportion of plant-derived components can reach up to 30%.

At present, the raw material of ethylene glycol comes from sugar cane in Brazil. The sugar industry in Brazil is well-developed. Recently, bioethanol production has also been added. There are a large number of wastes waiting to be used. Bagasse and molasses, which contain a lot of carbohydrates, are just enough to make ethylene glycol by biological fermentation. Some environmentalists are worried that the development of the sugar cane industry will occupy local farmland. In fact, the newly opened sugar cane field uses abandoned ranches and will not affect the production of other food crops.

When recycling beverage bottles, do you need to sort the plant bottles specifically? No need. Whether the bottles are from the oil industry or plant raw materials, they are all made of PET. No matter whether they are used, stored or recycled, they have the same properties and do not need to be treated differently. Want to take a taste of fresh plants green bottle? Currently, the four cities in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Tianjin, and Shenyang have already had their presence on the shelves, so look for bottles with green triangles.

Plant environmental protection bottle, reduce carbon emissions from "small"

Companies and researchers who produce plant environmental protection bottles are quite optimistic about their status and prospects. The Imperial College of Technology at London University has conducted a life cycle assessment analysis of plant environmental protection bottles. This analysis has also been reviewed by the Heidelberg Institute of Energy and Environment in Germany. The analysis shows that according to the GWP100 (global warming trend based on the 100-year time scale), compared with 100% petroleum-based PET, the use of plant environmental protection bottles is 25% less than the use of petroleum-derived PET bottles. From the farm's source to all aspects of plastic production, carbon emissions have decreased. The report also said that in the three years of the small-scale application, the factory has produced more than 14 billion green bottle packaging plants, the new packaging helped save 300,000 barrels of oil, which is equivalent to reducing nearly 135,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Of course, scientists also need to further improve the plant itself and its production process. At present, the cost of plant environmental protection bottles is higher than that of petroleum-derived PET plastic bottles. Although users of plant environmental protection bottles, FMCG manufacturers do not pass this cost on to consumers, reducing costs does benefit manufacturers. Dr. Huang Xiaoyan, who graduated from the University of Akron in the United States, said: “We are working with technology partners to develop and upgrade technologies to develop and use cellulose from various plants to extract ethylene glycol.” Dr. Huang Xiaoyan is the world's polyester Young experts in the field of materials, who have worked at INVISTA and Coca Cola, once worked as R&D managers and led the global polyester material R&D team to develop a series of high-performance resin, film and fiber applications for food and beverage packaging. Dr. Huang Xiaoyan believes that if ethylene glycol can be produced from cheaper and more common raw materials such as switchgrass, pine bark and corn husk, and even expand the source into organic waste generated from food production, it will have an impact on businesses, consumers and the environment. benefit. In addition, the "planting" of terephthalic acid has already been completed in the laboratory. It is believed that in the near future, a group of large companies will take the lead in applying this to commercial production, and eventually put 100% of environmentally-friendly bottles of plant origin on the market.