Lego took a huge step toward becoming more sustainable this year by introducing elements made out of plastic derived from sugarcane. A Filipino scientist has come up with another way to create bioplastic.
Denxybel Montinola, who is just 23 and a recent graduate of the University of San Carlos, says that his gears started turning when he saw a video on Facebook. In it, a researcher was explaining how he produced a bioplastic using only seaweed.
Montinola wanted to see if he could “recreate [that] invention and take it up a notch.” Ultimately he decided to add mango peels to the mix. Why mangoes? His home country is one of the world’s top producers, shipping more than 820,000 tons of the fruit every year.
A good number of those mangoes end up getting peeled and packaged. That creates a ready supply of very cheap — and very useful — ingredients for a kicked-up bioplastic.
Montinola told his hometown paper the Cebu Daily News that his mango-seaweed blend is “more robust and flexible and can mimic the mechanical strength of the conventional plastic.
Not only does it perform better than traditional plastic, but it’s also not going to wind up contaminating our rivers, streams, soil… or digestive systems. This bioplastic is completely water-soluble and no toxic chemicals are released as it disintegrates.
Clearly, then, it’s not going to make a suitable food or beverage container, but there are plenty of other tasks for which it’s ideal.
It could be a perfect scaffold material for doctors, says Montinola. That’s a possibility he may investigate further as he completes an internship in Taiwan at the Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biological Chemistry.
Another that way warrant a closer look is as a material to stop localized bleeding. One day it could help save lives and help save the planet at the same time.
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