Campuses:
Talk of reducing the world’s consumption of petroleum-based products usually revolves around driving fuel-efficient vehicles, turning down the thermostat or cutting back on bottled water.
But what if the toxic plastic additive used to make PVC into everyday items such as clothing, building materials and small electronics could be replaced with a non-toxic, sustainable substitute?
Dharma Kodali, research professor in the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering, aims to find out. His lab has developed a new kind of PVC additive derived from soy oil that acts as a plasticizer, or an agent that makes plastic flexible. The process uses the soy-based plasticizer in varying proportions to create PVC materials with different degrees of strength and flexibility.
Before joining the department, Kodali spent most of his career working in the food and agribusiness industry, developing new uses and applications for plant-based oil products.
“There are some problems with petroleum-based plasticizers,” Kodali says. A number of studies show that petroleum-based plasticizers—known as phthalates—leach out of PVC materials and can be harmful to humans as well as the environment. And when phthalates leach out, PVC materials can become brittle.
By using soy-based plasticizers, Kodali says, those problems can be eliminated and product costs may be lower. One challenge is figuring out which applications work best with the new material. He’s working with Twin Cities-based Andersen Windows, for example, to test how the soy-based plasticizers could work with window weatherstripping that needs to expand and contract as temperatures rise and fall.
As he demonstrates how a strip of soy plasticized PVC bends just as flexibly as one plasticized with petroleum materials, Kodali says the next step is to go from lab scale to making 50-gallon batches of soy-based plasticizers over the next few months, and then to full-scale production.
He’s also working with the University of Minnesota’s Office for Technology Commercialization, which says bio-based polymers are a fast-growing and very large potential market. The licensing process likely will take place over the next few months, Kodali says. “Using renewable and natural resources as a substitute for phthalates is a much safer solution.”
–Becky Beyers
