Scientists make plastic from Christmas trees

Scientists have developed a renewable plastic from a chemical called pinene found in pine needles. Pinene gives pine trees their distinctive “Christmas smell” and is a waste product from the paper industry. The researchers hope the plastic could be used in, for example, food packaging and plastic bags.
Degradable polyesters such as PLA can be mixed with a rubbery polymer called caprolactone to make them more flexible. Caprolactone is made from crude oil, and so the resulting plastic isn’t totally renewable. The researchers used pinene in the place of caprolactone. An article about the research is published in Polymer Chemistry (News Item University of Bath, 4 January 2017).
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Click here for the published article (213 kB).

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