Could plastic grow on trees?

A major step towards creating "biorefineries" that can turn plants and trees into plastics and petrol has been reported by chemists.

The advance in renewable energy comes as Colin Campbell of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, based in London and Aberdeen, warns that global production of oil is set to peak in the next four years before entering a steepening decline, though the centre itself believes the decline could begin any time until 2015.

For years, chemists have quested for the elusive goal of finding a way to sidestep the use of crude oil as the root source of chemicals for plastic, fuels and scores of other industrial and household chemicals, aiming to replace it with inexpensive, nonpolluting renewable plant matter instead.

Today, there is a concerted global effort to identify ways of converting plant-derived molecules, especially cellulose, into replacements for petrochemical feedstocks. In that way, biorefineries would be used for the production of fuels, chemicals and plastics instead of traditional (petro)chemical processing.

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