Feathers are mostly made of keratin, the protein that's responsible for the strength of wool, hair, fingernails, and hooves, he added. So they "should be useful as a material."
Past efforts to create plastic from feathers resulted in products that didn’t hold up mechanically or weren't completely water-resistant, said Yang’s University of Nebraska colleague Narenda Reddy, who also worked on the project.
feathers have found another use in construction of buildings.
Feathers may already be used in feed in some parts of the world, and work has also been carried out on turning them into fuel and, more surprisingly, computer chips, but for an industry that is already held up as being the most sustainable meat producer, finding a good new use for a waste material simply raises the sector’s environmental credential further.Read
Disposal of feathers often involves a cost, but turning a waste product into a valuable commodity has benefits that are also economic.The feathers are not only getting a second life, but are substituting materials that currently take a lot of energy to produce, using non-sustainable raw materials.
Feathers may not seem to be any more resistant than furze but, in the same way that feathers protect chickens from the cold, they can keep people’s homes warm, and as much as 30 percent of the foam used to make regular insulation boards could be substituted with treated feathers.
To make the new plastic, the researchers started with chicken and turkey feathers that had been cleaned and pulverized into a fine dust.
They then added chemicals that made the keratin molecules join together to form long chains -- a process called polymerization.
The plastic they made was stronger than similar materials made from starch or soy proteins, and it stood up to water. Moreover, high temperature treatment of the feathers at the start of the process would blast out any possible contamination, such as from bird flu, according to Reddy.
The new material is a thermoplastic. "We can use heat and melt it to make different products," said Reddy. Heating it to a modest -- for industrial manufacturing -- 170 degrees Celsius allows the plastic to be molded into some desired shape, and it can be melted and remolded many times. Unlike most thermoplastics, which are petroleum-based, chicken-feather plastic uses no fossil fuels, the researchers said.
The feather-based plastic could be used for all kinds of products, from plastic cups and plates to furniture. In addition to making use of feathers that would otherwise end up in landfills, it is highly biodegradable.
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