Sweet! Potato Cars from Toyota
by on 01.13.05
OK, maybe not whole cars but at least components of them, such as the floor mats and spare wheel cover in the Toyota Raum. Well to be truthful these are currently made from their Eco-Plastic, which seems to be derived from the starch of of renewable crops like kenaf, sugar cane and corn. But they are investigating sweet potatoes from Indonesia. They absorbs CO2 while growing and can be composted after useful life. And also yield up useful Polylactic acid or PLA (see story on Ingeo) making it suitable for plastic production. The sweet potato based plastic might get a run their ES3 concept car however (shown here). Toyota report that the global bioplastics market is just 20,000 tonnes annually, but they reckon as much as 30 million tonnes of the total annual plastics demand of 150 million tonnes could be replaced by bioplastics. In view of that potential, Toyota aims to increase production to 20 million tonnes with a potential sales value of five trillion Yen. They also say that the “cost of the process, is only marginally greater than for conventional petroleum-based plastics.” The report we saw did not mention if the crop is genetically modified. Via New Car Net. ::Toyota Ecoplastic and ::Toyota on Sweet Potato. [by WM]
http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/more_than_cars/bio_afforest/satsumaimo.html
DEar Treehugger,
I am a sweetpotato breeder and USDA's expert on sweetpotato. There are no genetically engineered cultivars of sweetpotato commercially available in the US and I know of none released from Japan. We have excellent high starch genotypes available in the US - programs going back to World WAr II. The Japanese and Chinese have also developed high starch genotypes - used more often than corn starch. All developed through conventional plant breeding. It is not uncommon to see sweetpotatoes with up of 35 - 40 % dry matter mostly starch and some sugar that if grown to maturity produce sweetpotatoes that weigh 5 - 7 lbs. Really can produce much more starch per acre than corn. Would also be useful for ethanol to replace petroleum based fuels. Plants are the best alternative fuel - only alternative that take CO 2 out of atmosphere to reduce greenhouse gasses. There are many so-called weeds that will produce much more ethanol per acre with less input than corn, but no one lobbies for these weeds. Other alternatives to petroleum are good, but don't take CO2 out.
Hope this is helpful,
Janice Ryan-Bohac
Also, I am producing and owner of one agroindustria that the sweet potato like protein caloric source uses and, obtaining in the end pelets directed for the feeding animal with sweet potato and not of maize nor soya, I want to comment that the international center of the Pope (cip)Perú, www.cipotatoes.org, has around 6000 varieties within its bank of germoplasma, we counted on about 18 brought clones of sweet potato of its bank and we are releasing in the field the next month to it, directed to the necessities of the feeding animal, stop in content in dry matter, protein, resistant to virus, among other Contact Ing.. Daniel Reynoso in the CIP. I hope that he is of aid. Kindly. Alexander Lapp Venezuela lapporto@cantv.net