The last two centuries have brought great transformations to humanity. The biggest one, in my opinion, was, without a doubt, the fact that men began to live in large cities, bringing significant changes to their lifestyle and modifying their demands. But it was the great technological discoveries that made life in these great metropolises possible.

The transition from large-scale use of coal to oil throughout the 20th century was perhaps the greatest contribution to this change in humanity's lifestyle. We cannot forget the great contribution of electrical energy, in its various forms of generation.

The industrialization process accelerated the urbanization of societies, bringing the need to build new forms of supplying water, transport, food, energy, sanitation, etc.

At the end of the 19th century, coal and biomass were the major sources of energy for large cities in Europe, the United States and Asia. It was during this period that oil began its journey towards becoming the largest source of energy and an important raw material for that new society. The 20th century began with important technological advances, such as the consolidation of large-scale electrical energy generation, the development of oil fractionation into various streams, the development of explosion and diesel engines, among many other inventions. I highlight the first plastic production, “ Bakelite ”, by Leo Baekeland, in 1909.

The 20th century advances and the discovery of new products synthesized from petroleum derivatives continues to grow. Between 1914 and 1918 the first great war occurred, further accelerating the demand for oil and its derivatives. In 1927 the first synthetic rubber was produced: “Buna-N”. In 1933, Imperial Chemical Industries began producing “polyethylene”, beginning the new universe of thermoplastics!

Between 1939 and 1945 we had the Second World War, a sad period for humanity, due to the high number of deaths, injuries and disabilities, among other damages, but which, due to its technological demands, in its end, brought a new set of products to society. The second half of the 20th century accelerates the transformation of humanity. The “urban man” of large metropolises began to have a new lifestyle with the exponential demand for transport, energy, in various forms, food, health, water, etc., all of which required new materials.

Furthermore, the “rural man” undergoes a major transformation in order to meet the demands of the new urban society. The use of new forms of materials and energy are incorporated into your new lifestyle. Fossil fuels, synthetic fertilizers and new materials, mainly petroleum-derived thermoplastics, are now playing a fundamental role.

The 20th century ends with humanity becoming predominantly urban and consuming unimaginable quantities of fossil materials. The side effects of these demands appear and global warming, and its consequences, becomes the main one.

Society in the 21st century, due to its outstanding characteristics, today has a great need for thermoplastics, which meet a huge range of applications, from packaging for food and beverages, water and sanitation, transportation, energy, medical products, clothing, agriculture, etc.

The production of these thermoplastics, for the most part, requires petroleum or natural gas derivatives, with emphasis on polyethylene, polypropylene and polyvinyl chloride, which together represent the largest global consumption and the largest emission of greenhouse gases in this sector, during its manufacture.

The search for alternative production routes for these thermoplastics has been researched for a long time and solutions have already been applied on a large scale.

For the production of polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride, the basic raw material is ethylene, currently obtained from petrochemical Naphtha or the ethane fraction of natural gas. However, since the middle of the last century, the catalytic dehydration route of ethanol has been known, which allows the manufacture of ethylene.

Brazil has already used this route, on an industrial scale, in two manufacturing units, located in the Northeast. At Companhia Alcoolquímica Nacional, in Cabo de Santo Agostinho, Pernambuco and at Salgema Indústrias Químicas, in Maceió, Alagoas.

Salgema, using technology developed by Petroquisa, a subsidiary company of Petrobras, built and operated for around 10 years a unit with a production capacity of 120,000 tons per year of ethylene, entirely aimed at the production of dichloroethane/polyvinyl chloride.

In the early 1990s, the petrochemical route to ethylene production became more competitive and these units were discontinued. In 2005, with the world's population already aware of the need to replace fossil products, which emit greenhouse gases, I visited, as a member of Braskem, the Toyota Motor Company, in its Corolla car dismantling unit, the largest global production at that time, located in the city of Nagoya, Japan, where a unit was completely dismantled and its components separated by type of material, aiming for reuse.

During the visit, I learned that the biggest challenge at that time was replacing products produced from fossil raw materials. It was then that I remembered the unit and ethylene from ethanol in Maceió. I returned with the fixed idea of producing ethylene from ethanol, a product that Brazil would become the largest producer in the world.

Together with colleagues, we designed a pilot unit for the development of high-quality ethylene, which could be used in production units for different types of polyethylene (linear, high density, etc.). A year after my visit, we had prototypes of small plastic cars, made with ethylene from sugar cane ethanol!

Toyota was thrilled with the development and supported Braskem in developing the project on an industrial scale. In 2010, at the Triunfo Industrial Complex, in Rio Grande do Sul, production began in an industrial unit, with a capacity for 200,000 tons of ethylene per year, which began to be used in the existing Polyethylene production units, making Braskem the largest producer of Biopolymers in the world.

The product, now sold globally, is a great success, leading Braskem to expand the unit's original capacity by around 50,000 tons per year. Thus, the demand for ethanol for the production of thermoplastics at this unit is already greater than 600 thousand cubic meters per year.

New factories must be built using this technology, such as the project underway in Thailand. Several initiatives are under development for the production of propylene, also from ethanol, and the economic viability of these routes is expected in the future. Brazilian ethanol is at the global ecological forefront. Ten years from now we will have a lot more green plastics.