In this photo, a woman recycles dishes made from bamboo and food waste.Credit: Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University
Scientists have developed a set of “green” tableware made from sugarcane and bamboo that does not sacrifice convenience and functionality and can serve as a potential replacement for plastic cups and other single-use plastic containers. Unlike traditional plastics or biodegradable polymers, which can take up to 450 years to decompose or require high temperatures, this non-toxic, eco-friendly material breaks down in just 60 days and is clean enough for your morning coffee or takeaway dinner. This plastic alternative was featured in Matter magazine on November 12, 2020.
“To be honest, when I first came to the US in 2007, I was horrified by single-use plastic containers in supermarkets,” says correspondent Hongli (Julie) Zhu of Northeastern University. “It makes our life easier, but at the same time it becomes a waste that cannot be decomposed in the environment.” wondered: “Can we use more environmentally friendly materials?”
To find an alternative to plastic food containers, Zhu and her colleagues turned to bamboo and one of the food industry’s biggest wastes: bagasse, also known as sugarcane cellulose. The team mixed long, thin bamboo fibers with short, thick bagasse fibers to form a dense web, and molded the containers from two mechanically stable and biodegradable materials. Not only is this new green utensil as strong as plastic and can hold liquids, but it is also cleaner than biodegradable materials made from recycled materials that may not completely discolor, and it starts to break down after 30-45 days in soil and completely loses its properties. original activity. form after 60 days.
“Making food containers is a challenging task. They should not only be biodegradable,” Zhu said. “On the one hand, we need a food-safe material, on the other hand, the container must have good mechanical strength when wet and be very clean, because the container will be used to store hot coffee, hot lunch.”
The researchers added alkyl ketene dimer (AKD), an environmentally friendly chemical widely used in the food industry, to improve the oil and water resistance of molded utensils, ensuring the product stays wet. With the addition of this ingredient, the new utensils outperform commercial biodegradable food containers such as other bagasse-based utensils and egg cartons in terms of mechanical strength, oil resistance, and non-toxicity.
The cookware designed by the researchers has another benefit: a significantly reduced carbon footprint. The manufacturing process of a new product releases 97% less carbon dioxide than commercially available plastic containers and 65% less than paper products and biodegradable plastic. The team’s next steps are to improve the energy efficiency of the manufacturing process and further reduce costs in order to compete with plastic. While cups made from the new material ($2,333/ton) cost twice as much as biodegradable plastic ($4,750/ton), traditional plastic cups are still slightly cheaper ($2,177/ton).
“It’s hard to stop people from using disposable containers because it’s cheap and convenient,” Zhu said. “But I think one of the good solutions is to use more sustainable materials, to use biodegradable materials to make these disposable containers.”
Reference: “Biodegradable, Hygienic and Compostable Tableware Using Sugarcane-Bamboo Hybrid Fibers as an Alternative to Plastic”, Chao Liu, Peng Cheng Luan, Qiang Li, Zheng Cheng, Xiao Sun, Daxian Cao and Hongli Zhu, November 12, 2020. , DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2020.10.004
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Post time: Aug-14-2023