The Incredible Vanishing Plastic Eggshell.(Brief Article)

For most people in Hans Rausing's shoes, retirement would be a sweet option. He has a custom-built mansion on a 900-acre estate in tony Sussex in the south of England, complete with grazing deer and boar. He has a second home on the beach in Barbados. And money? Back in the 1940s, the Rausing family developed a four-sided carton of coated cardboard, folded flat on one end and pinched steeple-like on the other, and used it to propel their modest business in Sweden into one of the world's largest packaging companies. Now TetraPak cartons hold milk and juice in refrigerators around the world. In 1995 Rausing quit the firm and sold his stake to his older brother for a reputed [pound]4 billion, making him one of Britain's richest people. He promised not to compete with the company for five years.

But Rausing couldn't stay away. Six months ago he took financial control of a fledgling firm, EcoLean, in his native Sweden, that has developed a new packaging material. Unlike conventional substances, it takes very little energy to produce, is made up mostly of a natural material in abundant supply and, when exposed to sunlight, disappears in a matter of hours. If it turns out to be as good as Rausing hopes, it could go a long way toward easing the problems of a litter-strewn world. Plastics these days seem to wrap, enclose or bottle just about everything, and landfills are filled to the brim with the stuff. "I saw there was this wonderful opportunity that would probably disappear if I didn't do anything," he says.

The brain behind EcoLean is chemist Ake Rosen. Ever since the 1980s, Rosen had been dreaming of fashioning a hybrid material (part natural, part synthetic) that would have the durability, light weight and cheapness of ordinary plastic. The world, however, was not ready for it, or so he thought. Then in 1996, Rosen quit to form EcoLean, his own start-up, where he could pursue his dream packaging material full time. He first considered starch as the basic ingredient, but it biodegraded too quickly. He also tried talc. Then he tried one of the world's most common minerals, calcium carbonate, also known as chalk. It turned out to have very good prospects indeed.

A monument to Rosen's inspiration can be found in the forecourt of EcoLean's main plant in Helsingborg in southern Sweden. It is a giant egg. Eggshells, it happens, are 95 percent calcium carbonate. And when it comes to eggs, they are a perfect packaging material--though a tad too brittle. Rosen, however, found a way to improve on nature's formula. The other 5 percent of eggshells consists of a crucial "binding agent" that keeps the chalk from turning into dust and toughens the shells. Instead of using the natural protein as a binding agent, Rosen used polyolefins, a type of plastic derived from natural gas. After experimenting with the proportions, Rosen hit upon a LeanMaterial that consists of up to 70 percent chalk and 30 percent polyolefins..

LeanMaterial looks and feels like conventional plastic, but it isn't. According to Rosen's tests, EcoLean asserts ...