Plastic products have brought great convenience to our lives by way of its scalable manufacturing process, light weight, robust mechanical properties, versatility, low cost and resistance to corrosion. These products have been widely used in various fields such as packaging, food industry, electronics, construction and many other industries; among which about 16 billion disposable coffee cups are consumed every year and half billion plastic straws are discarded every day worldwide. However, it takes as long as 450 years or even longer for some plastics to degrade especially single-use plastics bags, lunchboxes and disposable cups, accounting for 40% of the total plastic production and rendering severe “white pollution”.
Meanwhile,
every year about 8 million tons of plastic waste is dumped into oceans, which
has caused significant harm to marine life. Current treatment to plastic
includes land filling, incineration and recycling among which landfill
treatment is the primary approach to handling single-use plastic products;
however, it is difficult for plastics to degrade naturally, which causes water
pollution and restricted agriculture development. Waste plastic recycling is
the best solution so far to reduce the white pollution but complex and high
cost treatments are generally involved, which has significantly hindered its
development. Therefore, developing environmentally friendly and biodegradable
alternatives to current plastics represents an emerging need for a sustainable
future.
Great
efforts have been made to develop biodegradable materials to substitute
conventional petroleum-derived plastics. Among the advancements, molded pulp
products made from wood fibers and recycled papers have been sought after. Such
molded pulp products are inherently biodegradable and have been used in
packaging. Nevertheless, applying current molded pulp into food packaging is
still highly challenging, mainly because of concerns regarding the safety of
food packaging and wet strength. Meanwhile, the application of current molded
pulp is hindered by its poor performances with regard to weak mechanical
strength under oil and water. This poor performance could be attributed to the
low quality of the fiber used for making molded pulp products. Developing
molded pulp products that are safe for food packaging and have stable mechanical
strength by using sustainable resources could thus open a significant pathway
for replacing traditional food packaging. A clean, green, renewable and
biodegradable alternative to the plastic-based food containers is the sugarcane
bagasse pulp. However, the sugarcane bagasse pulp encounters low strength
induced by its short fibers, which has significantly hindered the use of
sugarcane bagasse pulp.
To
address this challenge, scientists developed a fiber hybridization strategy by
blending long bamboo fibers with the short sugarcane bagasse fibers. The long
bamboo fibers possess the advantages of long fibers, high mechanical strength,
antivirus properties, and cost-effectiveness, and the short sugarcane bagasse
fibers can physically interwind with the long bamboo fibers to form a tightly
interacted network that further enhances the mechanical properties of the
derived end products. Moreover, in comparison with most trees, the growth
period of bamboo is much shorter and its processability is generally better.
These inherent features make bamboo fiber a potential alternative to strengthen
sugarcane bagasse pulp and also the obtained products have exceptional
performances, including full biodegradability, excellent water and oil
resistance, superior mechanical strength, low carbon emission, high food
safety, and low cost, as well as excellent processability and scalability,
which thus represents a potential replacement of current plasticware for food
packaging.
Bamboo
biomass thus represents an eco-friendly, low cost, and biodegradable
alternative to synthetic plastics for food packaging.
Source
Chao Liu, Pengcheng Luan, Qiang Li, Zheng Cheng, Xiao Sun,
Daxian Cao, Hongli Zhu. Biodegradable, Hygienic, and Compostable Tableware from Hybrid Sugarcane and Bamboo Fibers as Plastic Alternative. Matter 3, 2022: 2066–2079.