Shrimp skins are made into biodegradable bioplastics

the United States alone, 34 million tons of plastic waste are produced each year, but only
7% of
of this waste is recycled. Plastics have many advantages: they are strong, cheap and easy to produce, but they are also the biggest problems they cause to the environment and humans. Because the chemical structure of plastics is so strong, they can not degrade at all for
,000
years, destroy soil, affect plant growth, and even cause ecological disasters in a chronic way. If plastics are abandoned in the ocean, they can endanger the lives of marine life. About
million tons
of garbage are now floating in the ocean currents.how do we deal with it
?
today's society is so dependent on plastic that all attempts to resist it have failed. But what if we choose a safe, plastic-like alternative
?
you might have thought of bioplastics, a non-hazardous material made from renewable cellulose. But this alternative is not the best because they degrade slowly and inadequately in the soil. And it uses a small range of packaging materials or simple food or beverage containers.researchers at
(Wyss
at the Harvard Institute of Bioengineering claim that the new bioplastics they produce from shrimp skins are much more omnine, more biodegradable and can even increase the growth rate of plants. The plastic is made from crustaceans, a shell state of existence that is the second most widely distributed substance on Earth and is the main component of the hard shells of crustaceans, such as the layers of insects and the elastic wings of butterflies.this bioplastic, called
shrilk
", produced with shell polysaccharose, can be produced at low cost and easily in an innovative way, and retains the robust and strong properties of shell polysaccharine. This allows engineers to use traditional die-casting or injection molding techniques for the first time to make renewable materials into
3D
finished products."the business community urgently needs a sustainable material that can be produced on a large scale." "Our scalable production method demonstrates that it is feasible to make plastics from shell polysaccharine, an easily available, low-cost material, and has the potential for large-scale industrial production," donald, president of

at the Harvard Institute of Bioengineering, said in March. Oncedumped in landfills, the
shrilk
" material can be broken down in a matter of weeks, not hundreds of years of plastic. Even more exciting is that when
shrilk
this material is broken down, they release nutrients into the soil, which promotes plant growth. They've experimented with growing California black-eyed pea plants to show that the breakdown of crustaceans can really promote plant growth in the same soil.