Blogs / Discoblog

This holiday season, Santa’s toy bag will again overflow with plastics. From Legos to Barbies to the Nintendo Wii, most toys today are made from non-degradable and non-renewable plastics derived from fossil fuels. Now a company is developing a bio-plastic that’s made from trees. Could ARBOFORM, or liquid wood, cure us of our plastic addiction?

Liquid wood is made mostly of lignin, one of the three major components of wood, the other two being cellulose and hemicellulose. Lignin is discarded during the paper-making process. A few years ago, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology in Germany took the lignin and combined it with natural fibers like natural fibers made of wood, hemp, and flax and natural additives such as wax to produce plastic granules. The resulting material was tough, melt-able, and mold-able, and has already been used to make car parts, hunting rifles, and golf tees. But there was one major problem: It stunk from the sulfurous substances that are used to extract lignin from wood and make it non-water-soluble.

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Feathers aren’t just for dusters anymore. The latest in green architecture may come from the chicken coop. Filipino scientist Menandro Acda has been developing a new low-cost building material made of cement and chicken feathers.

There’s no shortage of free feathers to use: Six percent of a chicken’s weight is feathers, and the Philippine poultry industry produces 40 million chickens per year. The disposal of feather waste is a huge problem. The keratin protein that makes feathers sturdy (it’s also found in hair and butterfly wings) takes a long time to degrade in landfills. Burning the stuff releases greenhouse gases. So why not use all that fluff to build houses?

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