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
Related Articles
- EP ID EP245408
- DOI -
- Views 106
- Downloads 0
Seismic Performance for Fixed Base and Base Isolated Reinforced Concrete Structure
The base isolation systems are gaining large attention as a mean to protect structure form seismic hazard. It is a suitable technology for earthquake resistant design of variety of structure like buildings, bridges, airp...
Performance of Fixed Speed Wind Turbine Generating Systems in Power Flow Solutions
An increased penetration of wind turbine generating systems into power grid calls for proper modeling of the systems and incorporating the model into various computational tools used in power system operation and plannin...
A Comparative Study between Waterfall and Incremental Software Development Life Cycle Model
Software development life cycle or SDLC for short is a methodology for designing, building, and maintaining information and industrial systems. There are various SDLC models widely used for developing software. SDLC mode...
Performance Analysis of Hopfield Network Associative Memory using Evolutionary Algorithm for Superimposed Images of Numerals
This paper presents the implementation of a Hebbian learning rule and genetic algorithm to store and later, recall of superimposed images of numerals in Hopfield network associative memory. A set of ten objects (i.e. 0 t...
Neural Network Allied With Recognition of Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions
This paper deals with recognition of facial expressions with the help of neural network. The working methodology include face detection , features extraction, points selection for calculating distance then sending these...