Chicken feathers may replace petroleum in some plastic products

Researchers have found ways to substitute keratin — specifically, chicken feathers — for petroleum in some plastic products, potentially opening a new market for poultry producers looking to offload their leftovers.
The poultry industry must deal with roughly 3 billion pounds of leftover chicken feathers each year, according to reports. Eastern BioPlastics has developed a process for removing keratin resin from the feathers that can then be used in the production of such items as flower pots. Right now, said company President Sonny Meyerhoeffer, the process is still in the refining stage. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American Nursery & Landscape Association are also working on ways to expand the potential of using feathers in place of petroleum.
Further studies are being done on the most cost-effective ways to implement the idea, according to researchers.

Researchers study turning chicken feathers into thermoplastics

A research team, led by Dr Yiqi Yang of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has developed a technique for turning chicken feathers into biodegradable thermoplastics, according to their study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
According to Yang, others have tried to develop thermoplastics from feathers, but so far none of them perform well when wet. "A lot of people have tried to use protein materials as the matrix material," he said. "They did not use chicken feathers but soya protein or plant proteins. The problem is the water stability. We believe we're the first to demonstrate that we can make chicken-feather-based thermoplastics stable in water, while still maintaining strong mechanical properties."
One of the driving ideas behind the research is to reduce the use of hydrocarbons in plastic production. "First of all, we wanted to make something that is totally degradable," said Yang. "Secondly, it's renewable. So you can have a bio-source of materials instead of using petrol-based materials. What we've tried to do is to turn the feathers themselves into thermoplastic, so it can also be used as the matrix material for composites, instead of using polyethylene or polypropylene."
The real-world possibilities of chicken feather plastics depend on the poultry industry becoming interested and investing in the process, said Yang, but a wide range of possible applications for the product exist. "Furniture construction, films, fibers or even fast-food containers, if people don't think of feathers when they get their food in it," he said.

Chicken feathers could aid oil spill clean-up

Researchers in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware have developed a method to mitigate oil spills using chicken feather fibers, according to physorg.com.
Prof. Richard Wool and his team have discovered how to maximize the self assembly of the oil-soaked feathers for absorption efficiency, trapping oil spilled on a water surface for effective removal. The correct size of the fibers is critical for assembly.
The U.S. poultry industry reportedly generates 5 to 6 billion pounds of feathers annually, an amount that Wool says could handle an oil spill covering some 200,000 square miles, or the entire economic zone of the Gulf of Mexico.
“The fibers are not attracted to the water,” Wool says, “but they are attracted to the oil, just as they are on live birds. And once a network of oil-soaked fibers is formed, it will reassemble, or restructure, even if it's temporarily broken up by wind or wave action.”

Feather solution to hydrogen storage

Richard Wool, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Delaware, and a team of students have found a way to store hydrogen, the gas that has been touted as the antidote to fossil-fuel dependency, according to a news report.
The team used chicken feathers – which turn into a carbonized powder which absorbs hydrogen when heated to about 840 F. Wool says using the chicken feathers to make the hydrogen a solid would also be more energy efficient.