Bioplastics that are available for the last decade or so has the potential to reduce the petroleum consumption for plastic by 15-20% by 2025, as per a new market study by Helmut Kaiser Consultancy. Improved technical properties and innovations open new markets and applications with higher profit potentials in automotive, medicine and electronics. Bioplastics are biodegradable and can be made from a wide range of different plants. In the future genetically modified plants will need less water and reduce the costs.
When bioplastic companies change their strategy from just replacing current products to new applications, product conceptions and production processes, profitability and salability increase dramatically. In 2025, Europe will count for 31% share, USA for 28% share and Asia will be the major market with 32% share of the total global demand. Asia has the advantage that genetically modified plants are easier to realize and new outlets for agriculture are faster to build up. Bioplastics markets grow at 8-10% pa. Bioplastics cover approximately 10-15% of the total plastics market and will increase market share to 25-30% by 2020. The market itself is huge, it reached over US$1 bln in 2007 and is expected to cross US$10 bln by 2020. A growing number of companies are foraying into and investing in this segment. New applications and innovations in the automotive and electronics industry lead to market boom. Over 500 bioplastics processing companies are currently on stream, with the figure expected to grow beyond 5000 by 2025.

Global bioplastics market has seen high growth through consumer demand for nontoxic products. Nontoxic is the key image, sustainable and environmentally friendly products is the driving force. Less than 3% of all waste plastic worldwide got recycled, compared with recycling rates of 30% for paper, 35% for metals and 18% for glass in 2006. Plastics are produced from byproducts of the fossil fuel processing. Fossil fuels are limited and are non renewable, bioplastics on the other hand could be a solution for the future. Bioplastics are plastics produced from biomass sources. Biomass sources are renewable and are more environmental friendly than the current sources for plastic production. Bioplastics and normal plastics have many things in common, the only difference is that, bioplastics use renewable resources in their manufacturing and are mostly biodegradable and recyclable. The production of bioplastics are more environmental friendly, as less CO2 are produced, thus not contributing much to the global warming. Bioplastics production companies are relatively small plants and are still in the early stages of the development and surely, with new developments in the future, the production will be more and more effective and will open new applications, and new opportunities. (www.hkc22.com/bioplastics. html)

American bioscience company, Metabolix recently found that switchgrass plants engineered using its multi-gene expression technology produced significant amounts of polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) bioplastics in leaf tissues. This result for the first time demonstrated the viability of producing bioplastics from switchgrass. Switchgrass is a native prairie grass that can be grown in abundance in the United States . It has been identified by the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture as a prime feedstock for producing next generation biofuels and bioproducts. The 2007 Energy Security and Efficiency Act mandated 16 billion gallons of ethanol produced by biomass crops such as switchgrass by the year 2022. The company in a joint venture (Telles) with ADM is commercializing its corn-based bioplastic, Mirel. Other companies making strides in bioplastics include Cargill's NatureWorks�a JV between Teijin and Cargill�with its corn-based PLA under the name Ingeo. The company has recently signed agreement with Resinex to distribute its products across Europe and also a master licensing agreement with leading worldwide textile company. Also in the league, US company, Cereplast has announced to expand the 227,000 tpa production capacity of its bioplastics by 2010. Among the European developments, a Swiss-German partnership between Pyramid Technologies and german bioplastics will initiate a production facility for the biopolymer PLA having capacity of 60.000 tpa by H2 of 2009 at Guben, a city on the German-Polish border in eastern Brandenburg . Combine, a UK based joint project has developed a first generation of high performance composite materials which use completely biodegradable natural fibre reinforced plastics. The Combine project is turning the natural fibres into long, aligned reinforcements to take advantage of their inherent mechanical properties of plants in structural applications with an added benefit of low weight relative to conventional reinforcements such as glass fibres. This will lead to a greater use of bioplastics which had a limited scope and use till now due to low mechanical properties. Polylactic acid (PLA), a corn-derived bio plastic has been identified as a perfect matrix material by the consortium.
Undertaking another major breakthrough, Brazil 's largest petrochemical company Braskem has produced the first samples of polypropylene (PP) from 100% renewable raw material (sugar cane) after developing the sugarcane ethanol based green polyethylene. The samples of the green PP�which has the same properties and characteristics of traditional PP�were first obtained on laboratory scale and then in a pilot plant, where homopolymers and copolymers were produced. The company is considering partners to accelerate the project's development in sectors like food packaging, personal and domestic hygiene articles and the automobile industry, among others. Also, Braskem is implementing a project to produce green polyethylene on an industrial scale with a capacity for 200,000 tpa with operations projected to begin in 2011. The company had recently signed a distribution agreement with Toyota Tsusho Corporation for distributing its green polyethylene in the Asian market.
Recently, Toyota Motor Corp announced at the BioJapan 2008 conference that it plans to replace 20% (in mass) of plastics used for its automobiles with bioplastics by 2015. With a company wide goal to reduce CO 2 emissions, the world's leading company aims to gradually replace materials including polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyurethane (PU) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) with polypropylene (PP) made from renewable sources in its interior parts.
65% of Bioplastics in 2007 is Packaging and Food related, reaching 40% in 2025, but Automotive and Electronics reach over 25% by 2025 with higher Profit potential. Innovations, Consumer demand and Legislation will drive the markets.