Your plastic pal

摘要

One of the most promising alternatives to plastics made from oil is polylactic acid (PLA). It is biodegradable, safe enough to be used as food packaging, can be processed like existing thermoplastics into coloured or transparent material and can be manufactured from renewable resources such as maize and sugarcane. Although PLA has been around for decades, it is only in recent years that advances in production techniques, particularly by Cargill, a big American agricultural group, have made it feasible to produce the material commercially. Now a group of researchers led by Lee Sang-yup of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology say they have come up with an even better way to make pla, using the emerging science of synthetic biology.