07/11/06 New Ag Products

New Agri-based products. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Creating new uses for existing Ag products is becoming a major boon to the Ag industry. Not only are farmers producing food for the table but new and innovative products are being developed from those crops. A team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin have found a more economical way to use fructose, the sugar in fruit, as an alternative to petroleum in the development of raw materials used to build plastics, fuels and pharmaceuticals. Apple juice and corn, rather than petroleum, could be the raw materials for some of the plastics and pharmaceuticals of the future. University of Wisconsin chemical engineer James Dumesic and his team found an inexpensive, efficient way by converting fructose into an important component called HMF that up until now was too expensive to manufacture for commercial use. DUMESIC: I think the importance is that we now have a route for making HMF from fructose that should be more cost effective than the current ways of doing it. HMF can be used as we showed in paper last year for the production of diesel fuel and there's a number of white papers written by people such as the Department of Energy personnel indicating that HMF can be used as a monomer in the synthesis of polyester polymers. Bottom line&plastic. The ingredient, called 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), can be converted into one of the building blocks of polyester, meaning that the plastic could in theory be made entirely from plants, rather than petrochemicals. DUMESIC: It would be a potential high value product you could make from agricultural feed stock. The HMF some of these reports have shown is a very flexible molecule and you can take it over towards fuel applications or it has the potential to be used in these polymer applications. So it looks like it's a good platform chemical. HMF is formed when heat breaks down sugars. It appears in many heat-processed foods, including fruit juices, milk and honey, and is thought to be harmless at low levels. Dumesic's team has created this new process of creating HMF but cautions that there is still another step needed. DUMESIC: I think what people would have to do now is look at our process and in these speculations that people have had in using HMF as a monomer for polymers, that's been mainly speculation so I think the polymer people would have to actually start making the polymers and seeing if their physical properties were in fact what they predict them to be. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.