Dishes made from traditional plastic or biodegradable polymers take about 450 years to decompose or require
To find an alternative to plastic containersfor food, Julie Zhu of Northeastern University and her colleagues turned their attention to bamboo and sugarcane. By the way, this is one of the largest food industry waste. By weaving long and thin bamboo fibers with short and thick fibers of cake to form a dense web, the scientists created two-material containers that were mechanically stable and biodegradable.
Credit: Ruby Wallau / Northeastern University.
The new green cookware is durable enough tohold liquids like plastic and are cleaner than biodegradable materials made from recycled materials, which cannot be completely stripped of paint. Additionally, these containers begin to decompose after being in the soil for 30-45 days and completely lose their shape after 60 days.
Biodegradable cup. Credit: Liu et al.
The researchers added an alkyl ketene dimer (AKD),a widely used environmentally friendly chemical in the food industry to improve oil and water resistance of cookware, ensuring product strength even when wet. With the addition of this ingredient, the new cookware has outperformed commercial biodegradable food containers in mechanical strength, grease resistance and non-toxicity.
Decomposition of biodegradable tableware in 60 days. Credit: Liu et al.
The cookware developed by the researchers also hasone advantage: significantly lower carbon footprint. The new product's manufacturing process emits 97% less CO2 than commercially available plastic containers and 65% less CO2 than paper products and biodegradable plastics.
“It's hard to prevent people from using disposablecontainers because it is cheap and convenient, ”concludes the author of the study. "But I think one good solution is to use more sustainable materials and biodegradable materials to make these disposable containers."
Read also
Hidden gene responsible for pandemic found in genome of coronavirus
The Doomsday glacier turned out to be more dangerous than scientists thought. We tell the main thing
It turned out that the universe is heating up. Temperature has increased 10 times in 10 billion years