Fun fact: cellulose (in wood) and chitin (in insect exoskeletons, fish scales, fungus cell-walls, etc.) are <i>also</i> polymers of glucose-derived sugars. Both are biodegradable, although <i>humans</i> can only digest the latter of the two.<p>Other fun fact: before the invention of entirely-synthetic plastics, we had <i>phenolic sheets</i>: layers of plain cellulose <i>laminated together</i>, originally using natural resin (tree sap), then later using synthetic resins, like Bakelite. These didn't have all the properties of synthetic plastics—you couldn't bend them, for example—but you could form them into shapes and introduce pigments, etc., while manufacturing. The earliest Printed Circuit Boards were Bakelite phenolic boards. (And even today, PCB insulator material is effectively a "synthetic phenolic board": it's <i>fibre-reinforced plastic</i>, which uses plastic itself in place of resin—and various synthetic fibres in place of cellulose—to achieve the same properties phenolic sheets have.)
> This new type of polycarbonate can be biodegraded back into carbon dioxide and sugar using enzymes from soil bacteria<p>This sounds amazing, but reading about various awesome breakthroughs has made me a bit cynical since there always is some sort of catch.<p>Does anyone know any limitations to this method which would make it difficult to scale?
The title of the article's pretty misleading. "sugar" means to most people either sucrose or glucose. Fructose, lactose, etc. could also qualify.<p>No, this uses a very obscure and expensive chemical called thymidine (most cost-effectively harvested from herring sperm, and primary precursor for anti-AIDS drug AZT). It may be "a sugar", but this article's playing fast and loose, akin to calling any pharmaceutical that ends with citrate or chloride "salt".
Sounds like this could also be really useful for future manufacturing industries on the surface of Mars or in the atmosphere of Venus. Polycarbonate also seems to have some resistance to sulfuric acid, which would be particularly useful in the Venusian atmosphere.
After extracting the sugar, many sugarcane mills burn the biomass (bagasse) for energy. So, they already have a free supply of CO2.<p>edit: Never mind, they are talking about another type of sugar.