Make Tractor Hoods From Corn and Soy

Even as resin suppliers incorporate more bio-based material into their products, it doesn’t always make sense to use them, says Roman Loza, PhD, research fellow at Ashland Performance Materials. “Usually where it makes sense is when there’s some potential for marketing, like if you’d be selling tractors to farmers,” says Loza. He cites Ashland’s partnership with John Deere to incorporate bio-based resins in an SMC process to produce tractor hoods: “It was targeted to show farmers that their products are ending up in the equipment they’re using for harvesting.”
 
Other scenarios in which it may make economic sense to use ‘green’ products include government programs such as Bio-Preferred and the USGBC’s LEED program, where the use of the products is driven by incentives.

Otherwise, green products face challenges in getting adopted by the marketplace. Though end users pay lip service to environmentally friendly products, they hesitate to pay a premium for them and balk at changing their processes. Suppliers are working to accommodate those needs. “The consumers of our products, don’t want to invest a lot of time and effort and money to change their processes, so we’ve designed our products to be drop-ins to their existing processes,” says Loza.“They ask if there’s a price premium they’re going to have to pay to use green technology. The answer to that is ‘not necessarily.’ We try to price our green resins competitively with non-green resins.”

During the session Sustainability and Green Composites: Unsaturated Polyester Resins from Renewable Resources at COMPOSITES+POLYCON 2009, Loza will talk about bio-based resin alternatives, including Ashland's ENVIREZ products.

The session takes place Friday, Jan. 16 from 10 a.m. to 10:50 a.m. For more information, click here.