Disposable tableware has brought convenience to people's lives, especially with the development of the food delivery industry, the number of disposable tableware consumed by people has increased sharply. my country’s online food delivery platforms are dominated by certain groups and certain companies. Environmental protection organizations have conducted statistics on the amount of disposable tableware consumed. They found that on average, 3.27 disposable plastic tableware will be consumed per order. These platforms will consume nearly 80 million, which does not include the consumption of other platforms and traditional catering stores. From a global perspective, the world consumes about 16 billion disposable coffee cups every year, and 1 billion plastic straws are discarded every day. Such a huge consumption makes about 8 million tons of plastic waste flow into the ocean every year. This plastic waste is conservatively estimated. It takes 450 years to degrade.
In order to solve the increasingly serious problem of "white pollution", Zhu Hongli's research team from Northeastern University in the United States blended bamboo fiber and bagasse fiber → cold pressing → hot pressing to prepare a tableware that can be quickly degraded. It only takes 60 days. Degraded by 48%; the Pb content in the tableware is 0.3633 mg/kg, which is only 1/8 of the standard; it has excellent water and oil resistance; the tensile strength is 35.0 MPa, and the Young's modulus is 3.25 GPa, much higher than PS Plastic cups: The CO2 emission of 1 kg of products is 0.22 kg, which is 97% lower than PS tableware, and the cost is only 2,333 USD/ton, which is close to PS tableware (2,177 USD/ton). From the seven aspects of safety, smell, CO2 emissions, cost, biodegradability, abundance and processability, it is not difficult to see that compared with other materials, the tableware made of this mixed fiber material is good in all aspects. Said perfect, if mass production is realized, the solution of the world's "white pollution" problem is just around the corner.
