Waste Chicken Feathers Fly Away As Bioplastics

Plastic is a wonderful invention. You can spout off all of the environmental bitching and complaining you want, but the oil-based product has changed our world...mostly for the better.

The only unfortunate aspects of plastic are that is made from an environmentally-taxing fossil fuel and (oil) and that it takes 1,000's of years to biodegrade. The latter means that it pollutes and clogs up our waters and landfills at a rate far greater than it leaves it.

The answer, in my opinion, isn't to abolish plastic, but instead find more responsible ways of making and utilizing it.

That pretty much means we're talking about bioplastic. Most bioplastics are made from PLA, a corn-based product, and that raises an important issue about using food for non-food purposes and all of the issues that go along with that.

However, Crisp Green reports that one researcher has figured out a way to turn waste chicken feathers into a bioplastic. They say,

Dr. Yiqi Yang, from the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln recently presented the attendees of the 241st National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society to an unexpected discovery: “feather-g-poly” plastic, an eco-friendly biomaterial that has excellent properties as a thermoplastic.

"Others have tried to develop thermoplastics from feathers," said Yiqi Yang. "But none of them perform well when wet. Using this technique, we believe we're the first to demonstrate that we can make chicken-feather-based thermoplastics stable in water while still maintaining strong mechanical properties."

To develop the new water-resistant thermoplastic, Yang and colleagues processed chicken feathers with chemicals, including methyl acrylate, a colorless liquid found in nail polish that undergoes polymerization - that's the process used in producing plastics in which molecules link together one by one into huge chains.

According to the researchers, the chicken feather bioplastic is not only strong but can also be melted down and reused like other thermoplastics. Even after its reuse, it maintains the water resisting feature. At the same time, these bioplastics get easily degraded without harming their surroundings, than the stretched time taken by any plastic products.

Read the rest at Crisp Green.

Where do you come down on the bioplastic conversation?

[Photo: StevenW/flickr]