Читать книгу Biobased Composites - Группа авторов - Страница 15

Due to the severe environmental impact of the petro‐based plastics which are produced from nonrenewable resources, biobased composites of renewable resources with relatively fast biodegradability are preferred as ecofriendly alternatives. Thus, natural fibers as reinforcement of polymeric based composites can offer excellent ecofriendly alternatives and good environmental indices at a low cost. This is due to the fact that most of the natural fibers have specific reasonable mechanical properties comparable to the traditional synthetic fibers [16–19, 36–41]. Because of this, several researchers have considered the natural fibers in biomaterials as environmental alternatives of low cost materials. The number of researches that considered natural fibers as reinforced materials in polymeric based composites in three years from 2016 to 2018 is illustrated in Figure 1.5. However, the aspect of the biobased composites is challenging and huge efforts are still required to replace the petro‐based composites with these biobased composites. Nevertheless, biobased composites have already been commercialized in many industrial applications such as the automotive and packaging industries.

More promising aspects and applications are under development using biobased composites, and the total weight of the biocomposite productions is expected to exceed thousands of tons annually in the few coming years [43]. It is believed that during the last three decades, the generation of solid wastes was almost doubled and about one third of these wastes were from packaging materials, especially the food packaging wastes. Hence, using biobased materials just for food packaging can yield a considerable impact on the environment by replacing the nondegradable materials with degradable and composting materials [44–46].

Figure 1.5 Number of publications considering natural fiber composites.

Source: Peças et al. [42]. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.