Vegemight

Industrial materials based on root veg prove their strength

Take an ordinary carrot, a swede or a turnip, some vegetable oil, and a handful of ryegrass. Then retire to a laboratory, tinker with the molecular structure - and come up with something to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels in everyday industrial materials.

One Scottish company, CelluComp, is marketing a fly-fishing rod using carrot fibre - and is conducting research into using swedes and turnips too.

“A vegetable is quite an amazing thing,” says director David Hepworth. “Considering it’s 99% water, it’s pretty damn strong. We’re taking these tiny fibres out which have already taken a lot of energy to make; the energy to extract them is less than making them from scratch.”

The fishing rod, he says, has “stunned” anglers by outperforming carbon fibre models. It was mainly intended as a ‘demonstrator’ product to show how well the carrot fibre would work - the ultimate aim being to develop it for wider use, in cars as well as other sports equipment.

Hepworth’s carrot fibre is actually combined with petroleum-based resin in the fishing rod. But another company, Cambridge Biopolymers, is working independently on the other half of the problem - hoping to derive bioresins for use in plastics for the construction industry, from vegetable oils such as rapeseed. It is aiming to commercialise its own product within two to two and a half years.

Meanwhile at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research, scientists have won £1 million funding from the DTI and industry to study how lactic acid for use in plastics can be derived from ryegrass.

“The clear tubs you pick up in supermarkets will most likely be PLA (polylactic acid) - there’s a huge market for that,” said Steve Fish, business development manager at the institute. “If we can take that kind of material from something like grass, that would be fantastic.” - Chris Alden

2 May 2007

Chris Alden