The disposable sanitary market is increasing and has reached over 40.000 billion USD in 2021, while the industry still faces critical sustainability issues. Several materials used for manufacturing these products (diapers, incontinence pads, women pads) are obtained from petroleum-based resources, are non-biodegradable, and release toxic microplastics. Here, alternative biopolymers based on protein and cellulose obtained from side-streams of the agro-food industry are used to produce fully natural and biodegradable disposable materials with useful properties for their use in sanitary articles. All raw materials used in the formulations were environmentally-safe and non-toxic and included plasticizing, foaming, and crosslinking agents. The materials were produced as porous structures and nonwoven filaments using highly-scalable polymer processing techniques, including extrusion, hot-pressing, and welding. The biopolymers showed a rapid swelling capacity in different test liquids and uptakes above 250 %, making them interesting to use as single-use disposable materials in sanitary applications. The material configurations allowed prototypes that reach up to 50 % biodegradability after 15 days, while the synthetic commercial counterparts did not show any biodegradability after 95 days of exposure to soil. In addition, the material showed resistance to mould growth by the sole addition of hydrophobic proteins and provided storage properties to these natural materials. The mass production of materials with properties of interest for sanitary applications while using natural raw materials from agro-food side-streams provides an economical and sustainable pathway to produce single-use sanitary articles that do not contribute to waste accumulation and release harmful leachates to the environment and future generations.

Use of polymer processing techniques to produce fully natural materials for sustainable and disposable sanitary products

Fall 2022 abstracts, posters, and presentations will launch in mid-September.

ACS Fall 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.