You may be a big fan of hot buttered corn on the cob — I certainly am — but your comfort level probably drops a few notches at the thought of getting your favorite drive-through coffee in a cup made from corn.

Plastics derived from corn have many admirable qualities. They’re biodegradable, for one thing, and corn is a renewable natural resource. Also, the manufacture of corn-based plastics generally causes less pollution, including fewer greenhouse-gas emissions, than does the production of plastics from a petroleum base.

But can those corn-based plastics take the heat? Not so much.

Corn-based plastics are made by fermenting corn sugar to produce a substance called lactic acid. In turn, that lactic acid is used to form a bioplastic called “polylactic acid,” or PLA. The trouble is that PLA has a lower heat tolerance than some petroleum-based plastics. So while a corn-based plastic bag might be dandy for carrying papers or other materials, filling a corn-based plastic bottle with still-hot-from-pasteurization catsup or filling a “corn cup” with hot java could be asking for trouble.

But it probably won’t surprise you that the scientists of the Agricultural Research Service are on the case. A chemist at ARS’s Western Regional Research Center at Albany, Calif., has teamed up with collaborators from a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company called Lapol LLC., to work on this problem.

Their goal is to broaden the range of applications for which corn-based plastics would be a good fit, and make those “corny” goods an alluring alternative to plastic goods based on petroleum.

In the plastics industry, the upper limit of PLA's heat tolerance—that's the temperature at which it may start to look like the inside of a lava lamp—is called its "heat-deflection temperature."

The ARS chemist and his industry partners are developing a whole new product to get around this obstacle. Known as a "heat-deflection temperature modifier," it can be blended with PLA to make the PLA more tolerant to high temperatures. And there's more good news: The modifier itself is more than 90 percent corn-based and is fully biodegradable.

The preliminary tests at the Albany lab have shown that when the scientists blend their modifier with the PLA, the modifier raises the PLA's heat-deflection temperature by at least 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The scientists are hopeful that with further research and development, the heat modifier could make it possible for hundreds of products that currently can't typically be made with PLA to someday be produced from this bioplastic.

ARS and Lapol are in the process of seeking a patent for the heat-deflection temperature modifier, because there currently aren't any commercially available modifiers of this type for PLA.

As you might imagine, this isn't ARS' first foray into making unusual products from corn. An ARS scientist in Peoria, Ill., has been working for several years on turning corn germ meal into a protein extender for plywood glues.

Here's the backstory: If America's biorefineries crank up corn ethanol production from the current level of about 9 billion gallons to 15 billion gallons by 2015, there's going to be a lot of a corn byproduct called corn germ meal lying around. That meal is typically sold to farmers for use as feed for poultry and livestock—but the animals can only eat so much.

Glue extenders are used in plywood production to reduce the amount of resin used in the glue, thus reducing the cost of making the plywood. The glue extenders also enhance the adhesiveness of the glue.

The conventional extender for most plywood glues is wheat flour. But the ARS scientist has shown in tests that the bonding strength of the corn-germ-meal-based glue is just as good as the standard wheat-flour-based formula, and it may be possible to boost the corn germ meal levels and reduce the resin levels, cutting costs even more.

Let's hear it for corn: We can eat it, we can run our cars with it, we can package our food in it and maybe someday we'll be building our houses with it!

The Agricultural Research Service is the chief in‑house scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

You can read more about ARS discoveries at http://www.ars.usda.gov/news.