Daffodil International University
Faculty of Engineering => EEE => Topic started by: saikat07 on February 28, 2020, 09:13:32 PM
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Lobster bisque and shrimp cocktail make for scrumptious meals, but at a price. The food industry generates 6 million to 8 million metric tons of crab, shrimp and lobster shell waste every year. Depending on the country, those claws and legs largely get dumped back into the ocean or into landfills.
In many of those same landfills, plastic trash relentlessly accumulates. Humans have produced over 8 billion tons of plastic since mass production began in the 1950s. Only 10 percent of plastic packaging gets recycled successfully. Most of the rest sits in landfills for a very long time (a plastic bottle takes about 450 years to break down), or escapes into the environment, perhaps sickening seabirds that swallow tiny pieces or gathering in the Pacific Ocean’s floating garbage patch (SN Online: 3/22/18)
Some scientists think it’s possible to tackle the two problems at once. Crustaceans’ hardy shells contain chitin, a material that, along with its derivative chitosan, offers many of plastic’s desirable properties and takes only weeks or months to biodegrade, rather than centuries.
The challenge is getting enough pure chitin and chitosan from the shells to make bio-based “plastic” in cost-effective ways. “There’s no blueprint or operating manual for what we’re doing,” says John Keyes, CEO of Mari Signum, a start-up company based just outside of Richmond, Va., that is devising ways to make environmentally friendly chitin. But a flurry of advances in green chemistry is providing some guideposts.