Biodegradable Plastic from Renewable Source

Apply

Biodegradable Plastic from Renewable Source

Journal Title: International journal of Emerging Trends in Science and Technology - Year 2017, Vol 4, Issue 6

Abstract

Materials used for food packaging today consist of a variety of petroleum-derived plastic polymer, metals, glass, paper and board, or combinations thereof. Among these packaging materials, plastic is found to be the best because of its long life properties. Thus, its utilization is increasing every day. However, plastics cannot be degraded by natural processes in a short period of time; therefore, they are left as plastic waste, causing environmental problems. Methods normally used to destroy other types of waste such as burning and burying are not suitable for plastic destruction. In response to these problems associated with plastic waste management, there has been considerable interest in the development and production of biodegradable plastics. The study aims to produce biodegradable plastic using cassava starch as its main component. Cassava and rubber seeds were obtained from Aluu and Omagwa villages in River state. The cassava tubers and rubber seeds oil were processed to obtain the starch and rubber seed oil respectively. The starch (filler) was mixed with water, rubber seed oil (cross linking agent), glycerol (plasticizer), and polyvinyl alcohol (binder). The mixture was heated at a temperature of 105 0C. Two different preparations were made by varying the starch, water, RSO and glycerol content mixture. The first preparation contained 50 grams starch, 50.0 grams water, 50.0 grams PVA, 10.0grams RSO, and 10.0 grams glycerol for the first batch .The mixture was stirred until it forms a thick sticky paste. The paste was then coagulated and passed through a two row mill. The resulting plastics and the polyethylene plastic which served as the control were cut into strips of equal dimensions (100 by 23 mm) for testing. The tensile strength test for the two different batches respectively were found to be 20.56 N/mm2 and 12.28 N/mm2 , while the polyethylene plastic was found to be 11.22 N/mm2 . The biodegradability test after burying the products for two weeks before unearthing revealed that the samples have biodegraded by reduction in dimensions; 22 by 12mm, and 28 by 15 for the two different batches respectively as against 100 by 23mm dimension for the polyethylene control which remain unchanged. The plastic produced showed biodegradability potential. It is therefore recommended that more work should be done in this field, especially in Nigeria so that we can have cleaner nations by reducing the conventional plastic waste in the environment

Authors and Affiliations

Jack I. R

Keywords

plastics environmental problem biodegradation starch and RSO.

EMF- MHCRF: Enhanced Median Filter (EMF) Based Noise Removal and Multilayer Hidden Conditional Random Field (MHCRF) Model for Dense Depth Map Reconstruction

Depth map reconstruction also named as disparity estimation and it becomes very difficult task in computer vision three dimensional (3D) tasks which has been studied used for more than three decades. Present high quality...

EP ID EP245408
DOI -
Views 91
Downloads 0