> From:
>   http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/14/2058246
> "Ostracus recommends a Christian Science Monitor piece on the 40-year quest
> to find a replacement for non-biodegradable plastic. One candidate, written
> off 20 years back but now developed to the point of practicality, is a
> formulation based on the lignin found in wood. And it turns out there is
> another strong environmental reason to put lignin to use in this way:
> burning it, which is its common fate today, releases the carbon dioxide that
> trees had sequestered. "Almost 40 years ago, American scientists took their
> first steps in a quest to break the world's dependence on plastics. But in
> those four decades, plastic products have become so cheap and durable that
> not even the forces of nature seem able to stop them. A soupy expanse of
> plastic waste — too tough for bacteria to break down — now covers an
> estimated 1 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean. ...[R]esearchers
> started hunting for a substitute for plastic's main ingredient, petroleum.
> They wanted something renewable, biodegradable, and abundant enough to be
> inexpensive.""

>  From the article:
> http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/02/11/could-%E2%80%98li...
> "This past holiday season, nativity figurines made from Tecnaro's "liquid
> wood" raised eyebrows among the bioplastic community. Sold as Arboform, the
> tough mixture is chock full of lignin – sometimes more than 50 percent,
> compared with the 30 percent threshold where many researchers would max out.
> The rest is fiber from wood, flax, or hemp, as well as a few additives.
> Raw Arboform consists of dark brown pebble-sized pellets. It is processed
> using the same equipment used to make conventional plastic. The granules are
> dropped into a barrel and heated until they melt. Then the contents are
> highly pressurized and forced into a rigid mold – that of a figurine,
> perhaps. As the liquid cools, Arboform actually conforms better than most
> plastics to the boundaries of complex molds, says Benjamin Porter, a
> researcher with Tecnaro. The 10-year-old, 10-person operation based in
> Ilsfeld, Germany, is very secretive about its ­liquid-wood formula – so
> proprietary that Dr. Sarkanen is a little skeptical. In 2001, his lab
> patented a simpler lignin-based plastic, one that lacks the secret
> combination of additives in Arboform."

> So, it's proprietary. But it's possible. :-)

> --Paul Fernhout