Cooperation between CAS and Local Authorities

Industrial Production Realized for Polylactic Acid Resin

Thanks to seven years’ tremendous efforts made by the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, CAS and Hisun Group, Zhejiang, the largest industrial demonstration production facility to manufacture green, degradable and environmental-friendly polylactic acid resin in China, with an annual output of 5,000 tons, has recently been built and put into operation on a large scale. Because various performance indexes are fully or partly on a par with those of U. S. A. Cargill Dow LLC, the products are sold to Western Europe, Japan, and other countries, which symbolizes that China has become the second largest producer in the world with an annual production of polylactic acid exceeding 5,000 tons and the quality has ranked top in the world.

During the development process, they regarded the domestic production of L-lactide that is necessary for the synthesis of polylactic acid as a breakthrough, and successively solved the three bottlenecks in preparing polylactic acid, i. e. improvement of the recovering rate of L-lactide, purification and polymerization. By doing so, the domestic-made product, with melting point at 160-180℃, glass transition temperature at 58-60℃, tensile strength over 65Mpa and modulus over 3Gpa, is acquired, the performances of which have reached the standards of similar polylactic acid products in other countries.