Sustainable development has found high priority amongst developed and developing countries alike. It seems apparent that global consumption of about 438 billion pieces of disposable non-biodegradable food containers per year is anything but sustainable, as most of which will end up in landfills....[ Read more ]

Sustainable development has found high priority amongst developed and developing countries alike. It seems apparent that global consumption of about 438 billion pieces of disposable non-biodegradable food containers per year is anything but sustainable, as most of which will end up in landfills.

Introduction and applications of biodegradable polymers such as PLA and PHA has had only gained less than expected popular acceptability due to pricing and processing issues. Therefore, a novel solution is proposed herewith, at least for short term, which might be an acceptable and alternate response and solution.

The proposed composite is composed of bamboo fiber, thermo plasticized starch (TPS), a non-biodegradable polymer (PP/HDPE) and a biodegradable polymer (PCL/PLA) as matrices. As the core material, TPS and its thermoplasticization and bamboo fiber are studied and the effective parameters and the processing windows are determined. Different blends of dual systems have also been compounded and studied before the triple & multi systems were produced. Several characterization techniques such as Differential Scanning Calorimetry, Optical Microscope, Scanning Electron Microscope, FTlR (Infra-red spectrometer), and X-Ray Diffraction are used to explore the interaction among the components on dual systems. Based on experience gained during working on binary systems, two formulations for the proposed composites are proposed and overall mechanical and processing properties of these composites are studied and presented. New emerging vocabulary such as degradability, biodegradability and compost-ability, their related definitions & standards and the position of the proposed composites according to these standards are discussed.