Banana peel starch to biodegradable alternative products for commercial plastics

Abstract

Plastics offers a variety of benefits and in variety of shapes, such as sheets, panels, film which can all be flexible as application requires. Plastic is a price competitive with other materials that offer similar advantages in industrial application. It is light weight strong and cheaper. However, use of too many plastics results in massive harmful effects. It take longer time to degrade which is estimated about 500 years to degrade and will become toxic after decomposed, it will affect the environment. Thus the biodegradable plastics become promising solution to solve all this problems. The objective of this study is to produce biodegradable plastic from banana peels as a substitute for commercial plastics and to prove that the starch in banana peel could be used in production of biodegradable plastics. The strength of the plastic was determined by elongation test and by comparing with a synthetic plastic. In soil burial degradation test, the intensity of degradation was tested by comparing with synthetic plastic, biodegradable plastic degraded at rapid rate and synthetic plastic did not degrade at all. Based on the entire test, bioplastic from banana peels can be used in industry for various applications such as molding, packaging and making carry bags, at the same time rescuing the environment from potential harm by synthetic plastics.