At the end of last month, a tanker carrying the last shipment of Middle Eastern crude oil arrived at Daesan Port in South Chungcheong Province. The U.S.-Iran war blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, triggering an emergency in crude oil supply and naphtha production. Thirteen organizations, including the Korea Food Industry Association, submitted a petition to the government stating that inventories of certain packaging raw materials had dwindled to just two weeks' worth. Ramen bags, snack wrappers, beverage PET bottles, and delivery containers are all made from naphtha. Without naphtha, there is no polypropylene, no polyethylene, and no PET. The same goes for medical syringes and IV bags. Vinyl prices have already jumped more than 40%, and warnings have emerged that by May, food producers may be unable to ship their products due to the lack of packaging. Even a single syringe in a hospital emergency room is, in effect, connected to an oil field in the Middle East. This is the true face of a country that "doesn't produce a single drop of oil."
This crisis is not a mere supply disruption. It is the explosion of structural vulnerability in a country that produces no oil yet depends entirely on imports for plastic feedstocks. But solutions do exist. Technologies that use microorganisms to produce plastic feedstocks directly from biomass, such as starch sugars, lignocellulosic waste, and food waste, have already reached a considerable level of maturity. For the past 30 years, my laboratory has developed technologies to produce various petrochemical-derived chemicals and plastics through biological means. We have developed processes that produce, at high efficiency, various polymer compounds including succinic acid, propanediol, nylon feedstocks, and lactam at concentrations of more than 100 grams per liter, as well as polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), a microbial polyester. PHA has been commercialized by CJ BIO, and sugarcane-based bio-polyethylene has been commercialized by Brazil's Braskem, which has already produced hundreds of millions of plastic bottles. Several companies worldwide, including NatureWorks in the United States, are producing polylactic acid. The technology to produce plastics from biological sources, without crude oil or naphtha, exists. The problem is cost competitiveness.
Bio-based plastics cost two to five times more than petrochemical products. Yet this crisis reveals how narrow the conventional economic calculation has been. The social costs incurred when supply chains collapse — food shortages, shortages of medical consumables, logistics paralysis — far exceed the premium price of bioplastics. When national security and supply chain resilience are factored into the economic calculation, bio-production capacity is actually a cheap insurance policy. Germany is pushing forward with its national bioeconomy strategy, and the U.S. Department of Energy is investing billions of dollars in biorefineries. We must face the reality that this is a path not only for the environment but also for supply chain security.
Korea must act now. The most realistic starting point is mandating bioplastics for garbage bags. A mandatory purchase structure linked to waste separation already exists, high-performance materials are not required, and biodegradability offers environmental benefits. Once mandated, domestic producers will gain a stable domestic market, and unit costs will naturally decline through economies of scale. A phased transition roadmap should also be established for medical consumables. At the same time, bio-based production facilities should be designated as strategic reserve infrastructure, with tax incentives, carbon credits, and green finance linked to them. Korea's metabolic engineering and synthetic biology capabilities are world-class. The government must be far more active in supporting the scale-up that connects this technological prowess from the laboratory to the industrial field. Even if economic efficiency is somewhat lower, the cost of maintaining domestic production capacity is negligible compared to the price paid when supply chains collapse.
The packaging crisis brought on by the Hormuz blockade is an unfortunate event, but it is also a warning to a country that has grown complacent with crude oil imports and dependence. If we return to the old ways after this crisis passes, we will repeat the same mistake at an even greater cost. Changing a single garbage bag may seem trivial. But that one bag opens the market for Korea's eco-friendly bio-chemical industry, raises the cost competitiveness of the technology, and becomes a buffer to withstand the next supply chain shock. We must treat securing bio-based capacity for essential goods as a national task, using this crisis as an opportunity. The path for a country that produces not a single drop of oil to become a country that can live without oil depends on the policy decisions we make right now.
