Corn is a delicious and nutritious food. With the advancement of technology, scientists have found that using corn can also produce a variety of plastic products. The "corn starch resin" that has been successfully researched in Japan and Taiwan in the near future is a new type of green environmental protection material. This kind of resin is made of corn as raw material, processed and plasticized, and it can be used to make a variety of disposable articles, such as cups, plastic bags, and commodity packaging. According to experiments, this packaging material can be disposed of through burning, biochemical decomposition, and insect feeding, thus eliminating the "white pollution" hazard.
Today, many large companies abroad are optimistic about this new environmentally friendly material. For example, Coca Cola used 500,000 Disposable cups at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, all of which were made of corn and plastic; the cups disappeared in open air in just 40 days.
So, how did corn become a plastic product? Visit the corn plastics factory of Cargill Road Co., Nebraska, USA, and you will see the whole process of turning corn into plastic. First of all, the sugar in the corn is extracted, and carbon, which is the base material for making plastics and fibers, is extracted through fermentation and distillation, and then processed into a fine particle with a diameter of 4.57 mm called polylactide (PLA). Finally, these small particles are pressed into bags, foam or tableware.