Super-durable plastic materials, self-destructible are made from shrimp shells and silk

Researchers at Harvard University have created a material called "shrilk", combined with materials in shrimp shells and silk, which is easy to laminated but extremely powerful.

In experiments with shrimp shell material, called chitosan , and silk, researchers at the Wys Institute of Biological Engineering for Harvard (Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering) combined the two objects. This material is at nano level to produce shrilk.

Crust.

"It's really like a giant armor of beetles, or cuticles," said Don Ingber, director of the Wys Institute. "It is very strong in tension. In conditions of wet it will also be very soft. We can get a lot of different properties of plastic by changing the way we make them."

Plastics can be convenient because they are cheap and flexible but they do not decompose. The debris and swirls in the Pacific Ocean, mainly made up of plastic debris suspended in the ocean, killed fish and wildlife on the sea, seriously devastating the ecosystem.Shrilk is a thoroughly biodegradable material , a necessary condition for success, Ingber said.

"In the middle of the Atlantic and the Pacific there are plastic islands floating, fishes get in there and die. We can't let this situation continue , " Ingber said. "I think many people are looking for alternative materials for plastics , which will have all the properties of plastic but are biodegradable. This cannot solve all problems. but that is the first positive step. "

The current challenge of shrilk is to do so to get a reasonable price. There are a lot of materials to make shrilk, Ingber said, the seafood industry emits a lot of shrimp shells "sometimes they have to pay to destroy them."

"We need to work with real manufacturers who know the current challenges of durability and cost , " Ingber said. "The existing materials, the production processes already exist, the problem is to integrate new materials into the production line."

Sprouting plants in the cup contain debris of shrilk material.

Researchers believe there are many contingency plans for development. In fact shrilk is also an excellent fertilizer."They are very nutritious, you can grow plants on them, just throw this material down and the tree will grow , " Ingber said.

What is more wonderful when we can fertilize trees with our own broken plastic household items? Shrilk will probably write a new history of plastic materials in the future.