"Green" plastics developed in a Cornell laboratory soon could become commercial products with the aid of a $300,000 grant from the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR).

NYSTAR's mission is to encourage economic development in New York state by supporting high-tech academic research that can form the basis for new businesses. The new grant supports research by Geoffrey Coates, Cornell professor of chemistry and chemical biology, that will be exploited by Novomer LLC, a company Coates has co-founded. He has found ways to combine carbon dioxide from the air with natural materials, such as plant oils, or materials called epoxides to form biodegradable materials that could replace common petroleum-based plastics in applications ranging from packaging to biomedical devices. 

What we commonly call plastics are, to a chemist, polymers -- long chains of complex molecules linked together to form a solid, moldable material. Most commonly used polymers, such as polystyrene or polypropylene, are made from molecules built around carbon atoms, and the most common raw material from which they are made is petroleum, a dwindling resource. In addition, most of them are difficult to break down chemically.

Some organic chemicals, when mixed together, will spontaneously polymerize -- the molecules link up on their own. Some epoxy glues work that way. But the natural materials Coates and his research group work with require help from a catalyst that encourages the chemical reaction but is not consumed by it. Through a combination of rational design and luck, Coates says, his group discovered a family of metal-based catalysts that polymerize carbon dioxide and epoxides into a clear, colorless, rigid plastic. Epoxides can be obtained either from petroleum products or from plant oils. Coates has, for example, made plastics from orange peel oil.

The new polymers are biodegradable, meaning they will eventually break down into the natural materials from which they were made, rather than sitting for decades in landfills.

Novomer LLC is a specialty materials company formed in July of 2004 by Coates, Scott Allen, a postdoctoral researcher in Coates' laboratory, and Anthony Eisenhut, president and CEO of KensaGroup, an Ithaca-based technology commercialization company.