Cooperation between CAS and Local Authorities

Farewell to White Pollution

With seven-year joint efforts of researchers and engineers from the Changchun Institute for Applied Chemistry, CAS and Zhejiang Hisun Group, a plot project to manufacture polylactic acid resin, a biodegradable and environmental-friendly plastic, has recently been built and successfully produced on an industrial scale. With an annual capacity of 5,000 tons, the production facility boasts the largest of its kind in China. As various performance indexes of the products are wholly or partially on a par with those of U. S. A. Cargill Dow, the products are well sold in Western Europe, Japan, etc. It symbolizes that China has become the second largest country in the world with the industrialized scale production of polylactic acid up to over 5,000 tons, and the quality ranks among the top ones internationally.

Each year, more than 20 million tons of plastic is consumed in China, and China boasts one of the largest corn production countries in the world. The core technologies adopted by the production line, such as lactic acid oligomer dissociation, L-lactide purification, green solvent-free bulk polymerization, etc. possess independent intellectual property. The packages, containers and tableware products made of polylactic acid will serve as green products in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Breakthrough in Key Technology and Innovative Materials?of Bio-diesel Production

Recently, the Research on Key Technology and Innovative Materials for Bio-diesel Production, a project under the Scientific & Technological Development Plan of the Qingdao Municipality, undertaken by the Institute of Oceanology, CAS and Shandong Peanut Research Institute, passed the acceptance check.

The project was launched in 2005. After two years efforts, the key technology and technical route for bio-diesel production by the chemical method and lipase method are established, with which, the extraction rate of bio-diesel is over 98%, the purity of glycerol reaches the purity standard for analysis, and various indexes of bio-diesel are superior than those in the prevailing bio-diesel standard GB/T20828-2007 in China and satisfy the bio-diesel standard in Germany. They collected four algal materials with oil content of more than 28% and two new peanut materials with oil content over 62% and made research on the extraction of algal oil, providing many technical reserves and making encouraging progress in the utilization of algal energies in China. At present, the technology of the project has been transferred and witnessed industrialization.