Biodegradable Plastics from Chicken Feathers

In Science Daily an article was posted explaining how waste chicken feathers could be used to make biodegradable plastics. I thought the idea was fantastic! Chicken feathers are easy to obtain and cheap because of all of the factories growing chickens. Using feathers would also cut down on factory waste sent to the landfill. Yang and his staff at the University of NE Lincoln are trying to develop plastics from renewable resources to replace those derived from petroleum products. He was the first to make chicken-feather-based thermoplastics stable in water while still maintaining strong mechanical properties.