Henry Ford dreamed of making plastic cars out of soy. Now Dow, DuPont and other chemical giants are also dreaming of a 'green' future. But, as Jim Thomas argues, bioplastic is not the eco-solution it's cracked up to be.

The future of plastic was always gleaming white. Monsanto's plastic 'house of the future' that once stood at the heart of Disneyworld's Epcot Center and the futuristic Space Hilton hotel in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey both featured shiny white doors, walls, ceilings and furniture. To designers of the mid-1960s hard, white, unbreakable plastic, like the white heat of the technology revolution, must have represented a pristine future moulded in the name of modernism. As Mr McGuire memorably whispered to Dustin Hoffman in the 1967 film, The Graduate: 'There's a great future in plastics. Think about it.'

Forty years later, its reputation tarnished and its 'house of the future' dismantled, the plastics industry is struggling to resurrect the image of plastic as the noble 'material of the future'. This time we are told that plastics will be soft, degradable and blend in with nature. They're called bioplastics and the industry has a new colour in mind: green. Read the rest of this entry »

An increasingly common surgical procedure for repairing spinal fractures might not be all it's cracked up to be–in fact, the surgery had the same effect on patient's pain as a placebo, two studies report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The technique, called vertebroplasty, involves injecting medical cement into a fractured spine bone to strengthen it. More than 38,000 such procedures are done in the United States every year and the number has been [increasing] rapidly, nearly doubling from 2001 to 2005 [Reuters]. But the new studies showed that the procedure alleviated pain about the same amount as a placebo "surgery," in which the physicians tapped on the spine and piped in the smell of cement to make groggy volunteer subjects believe they were receiving the real thing.

Researchers found that 36 volunteers who received sham surgery did just as well as 35 who got the real operation. A separate test, of 131 people at 11 medical centers, … also found that sham surgery produced a comparable degree of pain reduction and movement [Reuters]. Read the rest of this entry »