A sample piece of the new degradable plastic made with wood fibers. Photo: Wallenberg Wood Science Center, KTH Royal Institute of Technology.Plastics used in home furnishings and construction materials could be replaced by a new kind of wood-based degradable plastic with semi-structural strength. According to the Swedish researchers who developed the new composite material, it can be broken down without harming the environment, unlike conventional thermoplastics.
One of the goals behind the development of renewable wood composites is to make materials strong enough to replace the fossil-based materials used to manufacture products for home construction and furnishing, such as bathroom cabinets, doors, wall-boards and countertops. And these composites also need to be sustainable, or circular.
“Degradability enables circularity,” says Peter Olsén, a researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. “By degrading the plastic, the fibers can be recycled and the chemical components from the plastic reused.”
High-fiber content is the key to the strength of materials like fiberglass, but it’s difficult to produce a degradable wood composite without intensive heat damage from processes like melt-compounding. Now, in a paper in Nature Communications, Olsén and fellow researchers at KTH report a novel way to deliver both high fiber content and degradability.
“No one has been able to make a degradable plastic with fiber content this high before, while having good dispersion and low fiber damage,” Olsén says. “This enabled the material properties to be improved dramatically compared to previous attempts.”
In order to achieve a higher fiber content, the researchers combined polymer chemistry with process technology similar to that used for carbon fiber composites.
Everything is based on cheap and available raw materials, Olsén says. The degradation products are also harmless to the environment, and can be reused, leading to what Olsén calls ‘a fully-circular product concept’.
And it could actually save trees. “It invites recycling of wood fibers to enable reformation of the material,” he says.
But in order to move on to commercialization, Olsén says the formula needs to be optimized. “The key to the work is that it shows a new way of how we can create degradable biocomposites with high fiber content.”
This story is adapted from material from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.