Tableware made from sugarcane and bamboo breaks down in 60 days
|The new environmentally friendly cutlery is a better alternative to plastic
（GJZ）-----Scientists have designed a set of "green" tableware made from sugarcane and bamboo that doesn't sacrifice on convenience or functionality and could serve as a potential alternative to plastic cups and other disposable plastic containers. Unlike traditional plastic or biodegradable polymers—which can take as long as 450 years or require high temperatures to degrade—this non-toxic, eco-friendly material only takes 60 days to break down and is clean enough to hold your morning coffee or dinner takeout.
To find an alternative for plastic-based food containers, researchers turned to bamboos and one of the largest food-industry waste products: bagasse, Winding together long and thin bamboo fibers with short and thick bagasse fibers to form a tight network, the team moulded containers from the two materials that were mechanically stable and biodegradable. The new green tableware is not only strong enough to hold liquids as plastic does and cleaner than biodegradables made from recycled materials that might not be fully de-inked, but also starts decomposing after being in the soil for 30-45 days and completely loses its shape after 60 days.
The researchers added alkyl ketene dimer (AKD), a widely used eco-friendly chemical in the food industry, to increase oil and water resistance of the moulded tableware, ensuring the sturdiness of the product when wet. With the addition of this ingredient, the new tableware outperformed commercial biodegradable food containers
The tableware the researchers developed also comes with another advantage: a significantly smaller 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 plastic
——————www.guanjuzhe.com——————