04/16/07 Looking At Alternatives

Looking for alternatives. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. We have become an environmentally conscious nation. Gone are the days of blatantly dumping trash and chemicals with total disregard to the lasting effects. We tend to recycle and but products with less packaging. Even behind the scenes, efforts are being made to bring more environmentally friendly products to the marketplace. But scientists have been looking at some less than typical ingredients for mainstream uses like laundry and dishwashing detergents. Those new ingredients? Try corn. Agricultural Research Service scientist Randy Shogren has been working on the project. SHOGREN: We've taken two compounds that are derived from corn, sorbitol and citric acid and combined these chemically using a heated extruder. It has a highly negative charge on the product which is a polymer; a polyester and the advantage of this material is it's actually biodegradable. The result is a biodegradable product that enhances the cleaning ability of detergents by "softening" water and keeping calcium carbonate from crystallizing. SHOGREN: Hard water components in your tap water, calcium & magnesium form a kind of insoluble precipitate which will settle out on your clothes or glass and you know your glass will come out cloudy and yucky looking. Clothes will have a residue from the hard water. The sorbital citric polymer keeps that hard water precipitate in solution so it actually gets washed out with the waste water. Currently, the petroleum derivative polyacrylic acid is used but it is not biodegradable. SHOGREN: When you dispose of detergent water down a drain and it runs into lakes and rivers kind of  the polyacrylic can accumulate there in the water. I guess it's not highly toxic but it's still a concern that might possibly be a problem in the future. Shogren says the project is part of an agreement with another company. SHOGREN: Kind of the purpose of that company  their goal was to develop new bio-based, water soluble polymers which could be used in applications like detergents and other areas where these synthetic polymers are now used. Our lab has been working on corn for many, many years. That's kind of our goal here is to find new uses for corn. The company  Folia, is currently test marketing the product and depending on results, in time may make it to the general public for use. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.