The SacBee today has a nice description of MicroMidas, UCD and Child Family Institute for Innovation & Entrepreneurship alum: Micromidas plans to turn cardboard into oil substitute.

Micromidas is developing a process that converts corrugated cardboard into a chemical, paraxylene, used in making plastic bottles that usually comes from petroleum and, as a result, is tied to the price of petroleum. As the cost of oil goes up, so does this.

If you're a company that uses a lot of plastic packaging, that means your costs swing with the cost of oil.

Consumers don't feel it yet, but they will because eventually these guys are going to have to start passing along their price increases," Bissell said, "so there's a lot of demand by consumer products companies right now to have new technologies which particularly can reduce the volatility in the prices of these products that they use.