Dow Targets Large-Scale Production of Plastics from Sugarcane

Dow Chemical is planning construction of a bioplastics plant in Brazil that the company says will produce plastic from sugarcane in volumes competitive with plastics generated from petroleum. Later this year Dow, in a partnership with the Japanese firm Mitsui & Co., will start building a plant capable of producing 240 million liters of ethanol; by early 2012 Dow, which is already growing sugarcane across 42,000 acres of agricultural land in Brazil, will adapt that plant to convert that ethanol into hundreds of thousands of metric tons of polyethylene, the world’s most widely used plastic, using a dehydration process. While most large-scale chemical production comes from petroleum — including about 80 million tons of polyethylene produced annually — high oil prices have driven up the costs. In Brazil, government support for sugarcane ethanol production is expected to make biochemical production even more cost-competitive.