Improving Plastics' Properties Using Sunflowers

            A study conducted by W. Rathnayake and other co-workers developed a way to use sunflower oil to improve the properties of a common plastic called polypropylene so that it can be used under great thermo-mechanical stress. 

This is quite an impressive innovation because our society has become accustomed to using plastic and it is a part of our everyday life and quite frankly we can’t live without it.

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Plastic provides a sterile protection cover for many food containers, and even the containers themselves, plastics are even used to contain and withstand dangerous chemicals such as the plastic around car batteries. Plastics are very useful because they are very cheap and easy to manufacture, but a setback is the waste generated we have been able to recycle the plastics, but it is more expensive to re-purpose a small soda bottle than it is to just produce a new one. This isn’t a very green approach and that issue is what people have to deal with a daily basis as a result we produce more and more waste each day which is harmful to the environment.

With this research the scientist have figured out a way to take a green approach to create a composite material using plant oils to coat an easily recyclable plastic to make is useful in new ways, which will reduce waste, cut on costs and reduce the harmful products released into nature.

They approached the problem by cross linking cellulose fibers to the polypropylene plastics using bio-diesel made from sunflower oil. Cellulose is a common water soluble plant fiber that is known to be very strong and we will see cellulose fibers make up the structure in plants and trees. We can make bio-diesel from sunflower oil and it is a straight forward process of pressing the oils out of the raw seed and filtering and refining that oil into an end product of bio-diesel. The bio-diesel is made up of esters that can react both cellulose and polypropylene. Scientist fuse the bio-diesel to the plastic using sound frequencies and that allows the fibers of the plastic and bio-diesel to cross link, making this reaction very safe and really easy.

The scientist tested their results using a series of experiments that evaluated the ability of the composite to withstand stretch, impact, water repellent and high temperatures. The new plastic performed better than regular untreated plastic in every test and they talked about how there were still new ways to improve upon the results and make it even better.

Scientist have been working hard to find a way to reduce the amount of plastics we waste and one way they are doing it is by using sunflowers and the oil from it. Just by adding a sunflower oil that is greener to produce, because of the renew-ability and the abundance of it and mainly because it is very cheap, we gain a much better piece of plastic that can be of more use. There is still more testing that needs to be done to further develop the sunflower oil but it is a step in the right direction and created a spark that will become more. For example the sunflower oil was being tested to see if it would make the polypropylene more hydrophobic, which it didn’t, but as an unexpected result, it made it stronger like stated before. The idea of using sunflower oil was very clever because it is not a food that is in very high demand like corn is, but it is still grown quite often so taking advantage of a food that doesn’t compete with food demand makes it that much more suitable.

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