Issue Date: May 20, 2007

A good use for all those poultry feathers

By John K. Borchardt

One day soon, you could be planting flowers in pots made out of poultry feathers.

A team of researchers, headed by Virginia Tech biological systems engineer Justin Barone, has invented a process to convert the keratin in feathers into durable, biodegradable, lightweight plastics.

Americans' fondness for consuming poultry guarantees a plethora of feathers (for example, more than 2 billion pounds of dry chicken feathers annually), which typically are converted into animal feed or dumped into landfills.

And there's an economic bonus to the process: The new plastics can be made by the same equipment used to create petroleum-based plastics, and "keratin plastic can be processed at lower temperatures, providing energy savings," Barone says.

His team now is experimenting with biodegradable flowerpots made from feather plastic, a use that "doesn't require government regulatory approval, which is needed for food packaging or soda bottles," Barone says.

Another ongoing ecological experiment: Researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture have developed plastics based on corn and wheat starch for single-use food-service containers. Lead scientist Gregory Glenn's team developed a baking technology that produces starch-based biodegradable food containers with properties similar to those of the polystyrene foam containers currently used.