manufacturing comes from the chemical industry (Jackson, 1996, p. 130). Concerns about environmental and human health have prompted bans and restrictions on substances like phosphates in detergents and synthetic dyes in food. Compared to biological processes used for creating plant-based products, chemical manufacturing processes for organic minerals are also far more energy-intensive, requiring high pressures and temperatures. Almost all bioprocesses occur at 30-40 degrees (Morris & Ahmed, 1993). On the disposal side, the growing cost of waste disposal, both conventional and toxic, makes renewable materials increasingly attractive since they are far more capable of being safely re-assimilated by natural systems. Until recently, many farmers disposed of agricultural wastes by burning or landfilling them. The burning of straw created 56,000 tons of carbon monoxide annually in California alone (Hayes, 1998). The use of agricultural waste as an industrial feedstock thus serves a double purposeof reducing the cost of waste disposal and providing inexpensive materials for industry. Another aspect of the Carbohydrate Economy are the contributions made by the life sciences in the realm of bio-based materials. These are not so much traditional renewable materials, but materials made possible by applying natural principles to production through processes like bioprocessing, biodegradation and biomimetics. Learning from nature is not new to sciencequite the contrary, it was the foundation of sciencebut over the last 150 years a brute force approach to materials development, relying on heat, pressure and waste, has come to dominate. The bio-based materials revolution is, in a sense, the flip side of the same knowledge-base that is bringing us