Scientists have developed a set of “green” tableware made from sugarcane and bamboo that is both convenient and practical, promising to be a potential alternative to plastic cups and other single-use plastic containers. While traditional plastics or biodegradable polymers can take up to 450 years or high temperatures to decompose, this non-toxic and eco-friendly material decomposes in just 60 days and is clean enough to store your morning coffee or takeaway food. An article about this plastic alternative was published in the journal Matter on November 12, 2020.
“To be honest, when I first came to the U.S. in 2007, I was shocked by the ubiquity of single-use plastic containers in supermarkets,” says corresponding author Julie Hongli of Northeastern University. “They make our lives more convenient, but they also become waste that doesn’t decompose in the environment.” Later, seeing more plastic bowls, plates, and cutlery being thrown into the trash at seminars and meetings made her wonder, “Can we use more sustainable materials?”
In search of alternatives to plastic food containers, Zhu and her colleagues turned to bamboo and one of the largest sources of food industry waste: sugarcane bagasse. The team intertwined long, thin bamboo fibers with short, thick bagasse fibers to form a dense mesh and produced containers from these two materials that are both mechanically stable and biodegradable. Not only are these new eco-friendly containers as strong as plastic and able to hold liquids, they are also cleaner than biodegradable containers made from recycled materials, which may not be fully decontaminated. They begin to decompose in the soil after 30 to 45 days and are completely deformed after 60 days.
“Making food containers is not an easy task. They should not only be biodegradable,” Zhu said. “On the one hand, we need a food-safe material; on the other hand, the container should have high mechanical strength when wet and be very clean, since it will be used to store hot coffee and a hot lunch.”
The researchers added alkyl ketenedimer (AKD), an environmentally friendly chemical widely used in the food industry, to improve the molded tableware’s oil and water resistance, ensuring durability in humid environments. With this ingredient, the new tableware outperformed commercially available biodegradable food containers, such as other sugarcane bagasse tableware and egg cartons, in mechanical strength, oil resistance, and non-toxicity.
The cups developed by the researchers have another advantage: a significantly reduced carbon footprint. The production process of the new product produces 97% less CO2 than conventional plastic containers, and 65% less than paper and biodegradable plastic. The team’s next goal is to improve the energy efficiency of the production process and further reduce costs to make it competitive with plastic. Although cups made from the new material cost twice as much ($2,333 per ton) as those made from biodegradable plastic ($4,750 per ton), traditional plastic cups are still slightly cheaper ($2,177 per ton).
”It’s hard to stop people from using disposable containers because they are cheap and convenient,” Zhu said. “But I think a good solution would be to use more environmentally friendly, biodegradable materials to produce these disposable containers.”
Source: Liu Chao, Luan Pengcheng, Li Qiang, Cheng Zheng, Sun Xiao, Cao Daxian, and Zhu Hongli, “Biodegradable, Hygienic, and Compostable Tableware Made from Sugarcane-Bamboo Hybrid Fibers as an Alternative to Plastic,” Matter, November 12, 2020. DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2020.10.004
Post time: Sep-10-2025