It is a kind of plastic that can be used for food packaging, in automobile interiors or in consumer-electronics products. Unlike other plastics which are made from petroleum and are hard to eliminate, the new bio-based plastics are made from plants and, importantly, they are degradable.

As bioplastics can help the environment when compared with traditional plastics, for which the production results in the emission of carbon dioxide, interest in bioplastics is increasingly high, and this has encouraged research and development of the new material in many countries.

In Japan, private companies, especially those related to the plastics industry, saw the trend and began research on bioplastics over a decade ago. Many plastics manufacturers, consumer electronics manufacturers or even retailers have already based some parts of their products on bioplastics.

A leading Japanese plastics manufacturer Unikita has put a focus on the development of bioplastic-based products. It started research on the new materials 15 years ago, and the company today has a wide range of bioplastic products sold in the market under the name of Terramac.

Shigemitsu Murase, the general manager of the Terramac business development department at Unitika, said that as the trend was towards bio-based plastic, the company realised that it should move some of its manufacturing base into the bioplastics area.

Unitika developed bioplastic products by using a biomass material created from plant-derived polymers - polylactic acid or PLA. This is a key material, which when mixed with other compound substances like clay or calcium carbonate offers new properties to develop bioplastic-based products.

As a bioplastics-manufacturer, Unitika imports PLA resin from a US-based PLA-supplier and conducts research on a compounding process to develop various kinds of bio-based plastic products. So far the company has made more than 1,000 products from bio-based plastic material.

The company first launched bioplastic products as garbage bags and teabags 12 years ago, and now it produces various kinds of bio-based plastic products including packaging film, dishes, trays, cups, tea bags, garbage bags, garden planters, cosmetics bottles and even clothing.

Though the company puts more focus on the development of bio-based plastic products, the revenue generated from this area is still low. Of the total ¥250 billion (Bt33.8 billion) of revenue, Unitika generated only ¥700 million from bioplastic products.

This was because of the limited PLA supply to the market, Murase said. There is only one supplier in the world that can produce PLA resin with a production capacity of just 80,000 tonnes per year, so each bioplastics manufacturer gets only a small amount of key material to further develop bio-based plastic products.

He said that if there were more PLA suppliers in the market it would allow the company to grow more, by around 300 per cent.

PLA is derived from biomass such as corn, cassava or sugar-cane. Enzymes break starch in the plants down into glucose, and when fermented, it creates lactic acid.

The lactic acid is then polymerised and converted into a plastic called polylactic acid or PLA.

The polymerisation is the most difficult part of the process and requires special technology. Only Naturworks, the US-based PLA supplier, has the technology to produce PLA for commercial use.

Despite the lack of PLA supply, Murase believed the demand for bioplastic products would increase continuously by 10 to 15 per cent per year.

As bioplastics are environmentally friendly, Sony is another leading manufacturer which plans to use bioplastics to replace conventional plastics in some parts of its products.

The manufacturer of consumer-electronics devices has developed an environmental vision and the use of bioplastics, which the company called vegetable-based plastic, is also in the pipeline.

Hiroyuki Mori, a senior eco-material engineer at Sony's environmental affairs department, said the company began to adopt bio-based plastic materials to use in its products in 2000 and the initial application was the packaging film wrapped on Sony's mini-disc products, as well as a bio-based blister pack used for portable radios.

The company in 2002 also replaced 95 per cent of the plastic used as the case of the Walkman with vegetable-based plastic while it also employed the new material in some parts of Sony's intelligent robot, Aibo, and its accessories.

Even though the costs of bioplastics are higher than traditional plastics, Sony said it shouldered the increasing cost itself so the selling price of its products was the same.

Using bioplastics in electronic products, Mori said, requires the improvement of material properties so they have more features including durability, heat resistance and being flame retardant, for example. To get the bioplastics required, the company had to work with bioplastics manufacturers.

Improving the properties of bioplastics will help Sony expand the use of the new material in its products. After several years of effort, it has come out with the use of bio-based material to develop a contactless IC card.

The card, which has a chip embedded inside, is used as a prepaid card in Japan. Unlike other chip cards, the outside plastic material used in Sony's contactless IC card is all based on biomass material.

Meanwhile, it's working to use bio-based plastic in the cases of mobile phones, and a prototype bioplastic-based mobile phone has come out for testing.

As the trend is moving towards environmental concern, Sony believes that bioplastics are ideal, with possibilities to make attractive new products. However, an improvement in the material's performance as well as cost and supply are needed.

"To have bio-based plastic material in widespread use, there should be better and more varied biomass plastics with a more stable supply," Mori said.

At this stage only 1 per cent of Sony's total products are based on vegetable-based plastic but the company plans to increase the use of the new plastic if the price performance of the new material improves.

Like Sony, the largest Japanese retail conglomerate Aeon is also replacing some conventional plastic used in its products for bio-based plastic. Today Aeon uses around 550 tons of PLA to develop bio-based food packaging for Aeon's food product brand, Top Valu.

Even though Aeon realised the cost of using bioplastic material was about double that of traditional plastic, Hitoshi Tonomura at Aeon's food merchandising department said that with its environmentally friendly features the company promoted the use of bioplastics in its products.

Of all Aeon's products, around 40 per cent are food.

Currently, the use of bioplastics as food packaging such as plastic wrap and bottle caps accounts for only 2 per cent of the company's food products. The company plans to increase the proportion of bioplastic to 8 per cent by 2010.

The use of bioplastics in Japan is encouraged not only by the private sector but also by the government. The widespread use of bioplastics, Tonomura said, also needs government support to encourage people to use bioplastics.

The consumption of biomass plastics in Japan is around 20,000 tonnes a year while traditional plastic consumption is 10 million tonnes a year. To boost bioplastic use, the Japanese government has also set an aggressive plan to increase the use of bioplastics to reach 100,000 tonnes by 2010.

Tonomura said there would be opportunities for countries like Thailand, which had a base in agriculture, to become suppliers of biomass materials for bioplastic development for the world market.