Cathay Dupont Award: Engineering Thermoplastics Are Going ‘Green’

As high-performance materials follow the path taken by some commodity resins, farming could replace drilling as suppliers rely more on plants than oil or gas for feedstocks.

Commodity resins like polyolefins and PET have been in the forefront of biobased and recycled-content news over the last five to 10 years, but some engineering thermoplastics have been catching up. To ensure that such sustainable plastics are widely adopted, suppliers have been aiming to make them comparable to conventional resins in performance and cost-effectiveness.

Driven by markets such as packaging, automotive, electronics, consumer goods, and medical devices, there has been increasing activity among suppliers of engineering resins to develop biosourced feedstocks from plant oils, sugars, or starches to synthesize new monomers for some of their key materials. The emphasis by several companies has been on developing sugar sources from crop waste or other renewable chemicals from non-food biomass. Most of the commercial activity has been focused on nylons and polyesters, though some has been directed toward higher-end TPEs and TPUs.

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