Will sugar be the oil of the 21st century?

What with Coca-Cola's Diet, Lite, and Zero drinks, the sugar content of the world's popular fizzy drink seems to be disappearing. Until you look at the bottle itself. In May this year, Coca-Cola unveiled the ‘PlantBottle', the ‘bottle of the future' according to Coca-Cola's CEO Muhtar Kent, made partially from sugarcane and a sugarcane by-product. Some 2 billion of these new plant-based polyethylene (PET) bottles will be on shelves by the end of 2010.

Sugar is not just the stuff that rots your teeth. Long used as an alternative fuel, sugarcane, of late, has emerged as a material in ‘bioplastics', an industry estimated to take up to a third of the total plastics market by 2020.

Jim Thomas, a research manager at ETC (action group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration), likens the situation today to the end of the 19th century, when synthetic chemists were working out how to crack the hydrocarbon molecule.

'What you've got now is synthetic biologists doing the same thing with sugar - saying, "how can we biologically transform sugar into thousands of different...

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