Thirty minutes north of Omaha, outside Blair, Nebraska, the aroma of steaming corn—damp and sweet—falls upon my car like a heavy curtain. The farmland rolls on, and the source of the smell remains a ...

Larry West is an award-winning environmental journalist and writer. He won the Edward J. Meeman Award for Environmental Reporting. Polylactic acid (PLA), a plastic substitute made from fermented plant ...

PLA, or corn plastic, is made with Midwestern corn, not Middle East oil. Its production releases fewer toxic substances than making petroleum plastic and uses less energy, spewing an estimated ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

Like PET, polylactic acid can be extruded into sheet and then thermoformed, or injection molded into preforms and blown into bottles — and processed on the same machinery as PET. But PLA preparation ...

Into one end of the complex goes corn; out the other come white pellets, an industrial resin poised to become—if you can believe all the hype—the future of plastic in a post-petroleum world. The resin ...