Ohio-based plastics and resins company A. Schulman will be exhibiting a range of "design-enabling polymer materials" at the upcoming IDSA conference in August. Among the engineered plastics will be Agriplas, a wheat-straw bio-filler that is already in use in the Ford Flex and will soon appear in everything from small engine covers to lawn mower housings.

Technically called "Wheat Straw Fiber Filled Injection Molded Polypropylene," Agriplas is essentially filler that is added to regular polpropylene, so the end product uses less of the petroleum-based stuff; this reduces the carbon footprint of your average Agriplas-filled part by about 40% while giving you a weight savings of about 10%, and it can still be manufactured in standard injection-molding equipment. Best of all it comes from wheat straw fiber, not the part we eat, so there's no competition for the stuff between industries and all the messy politics that involves.