April 6, 2011
Chicken feathers, as unlikely as it seems, have turned out to be a wonderfully useful material. Among other things, researchers have found they make for great circuit boards and cheap, efficient storage tanks for hydrogen. Now it turns out they could also be used to create biodegradable, petroleum-free plastics. The team of researchers, led by Dr Yiqi Yang of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the United States, added a chemical called methyl acrylate to the resilient protein, keratin, found in poultry feathers to create the plastic.
According to Dr Yang, the thermoplastic is more durable than traditional plastics made from hydrocarbons such as polyethylene and polypropylene, which do not breakdown in the environment. Dr Yang said one of the main aims of the research was to develop a more environmentally-friendly method for plastic production.
"First of all we wanted to make something that is totally degradable; polyethylene and polypropylene are not," he told ABC News Online. "Secondly it's renewable. So you can have a bio-source of materials instead of using petrol-based materials."
According to Dr Yang, the biodegradable thermoplastic could be used in a variety of industries, including food packaging. "Furniture construction, films, fibres or even fast-food containers, if people don't think of feathers when they get their food in it," he told ABC News Online.
The research paper has been published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
