Increasingly, many of the plastic products we use every day are no longer based on petroleum raw material . Instead, they are made from biomass such as starch, sugar, corn and other sources that also happen to be food products.

Some laboratories have achieved impressive efficiencies under concentrated sunlight. SunPower Corp. is much closer to the market. The California-based company recently produced a record-setting 24.

Engineer and project manager Michael Blunk, Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology IWES, is one of the experts in the European project UpWind. The aim is to develop a new type of turbine.