Javier Fernandez admits he is not a huge fan of chess. “I’m not superb both,” he says.

Nonetheless, his queen, king, rook and knight are attracting quite a lot of consideration.

The black and white chess pieces are manufactured from plastic, however not the petroleum-based mostly kind specialists warn could also be laden with hormone-scrambling chemicals. Slightly, Fernandez and his colleagues molded the advanced recreation pieces from a compostable materials abundant in nature: Chitin.

It’s the stuff of shrimp shells, insect armor and butterfly wings — and now of a small collection of chess pieces, social gathering cups and egg cartons in a Cambridge, Mass., lab.

Researchers created chess pieces for example how you can make “nearly any 3D type with impressive precision.” (Wyss Institute, Harvard University)

“It’s so low-cost and considerable,” said Fernandez, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard College’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Impressed Engineering and co-creator of a examine on the material published in late February. “Besides vertebrates and plants, it’s in virtually every different dwelling thing on Earth.”

In the meantime, leftovers from fossil gas refining continue for use to construct everything from chip clips and cell phones, to kids’s toys and sippy cups. Evidence suggests the chemicals that give these plastic merchandise their characteristic hardiness or flexibility, such as phthalates and bisphenol A, can pose nasty consequences for human health. Although nonetheless hotly debated, most research of BPA, for instance, discover that it might mimic or block the physique’s hormone messengers chargeable for such crucial processes as metabolism, progress and reproduction.

On account of rising concerns, BPA-free products have flooded the market.

But scientists now suspect that some BPA replacements may be simply as dangerous . Final week, Mom Jones uncovered an obvious plastics business marketing campaign to bury such findings.

“We’re utilizing plastics in so many ways in which we don’t even suppose about them anymore,” stated Laura Vandenberg, a hormone disruptor researcher on the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “We still want these products. But the purpose was by no means to ban one chemical and replace it with one other that has the very same properties.”

The brand new chitin-based mostly bioplastic, Vandenberg mentioned, “holds great promise.”

Public health concerns with petroleum-based mostly plastics prolong past users, to their production and disposal, said Fernandez. Toxic chemicals spew from polyvinyl chloride plants, for example. Plastic waste accumulates in oceans and breaks down into tiny bits, which may focus toxic pollutants and journey up the marine meals chain.

“Most of our materials is coming from marine animals themselves,” said Fernandez of the chitin-based mostly plastic. “Once it is discarded, it degrades very easily — especially at sea.” The fabric is compostable, and can be used as fertilizer.

Of their new analysis paper, Fernandez and his colleague, Dr. Donald Ingber, describe a new method to course of chitosan, a form of chitin, making it doubtlessly viable for large-scale manufacturing with traditional casting or injection molding methods.

“Just about something you possibly can mold, you can make out of these items,” stated Ingber, founding director of the Wyss Institute and a professor at Harvard Medical Faculty and Boston Kids’s Hospital.

Whereas “probably toxic additives” are needed to alter the properties of typical plastics, Ingber famous that plasticizers are not required of their materials. Slightly, they enlist natural ingredients such as water and wooden flour, a waste product from wooden processing, to optimize the material’s form, power, resilience or flexibility. For certain merchandise, such as the purple, inexperienced and blue party cups Ingber and Fernandez created in their lab, recyclable dyes and wax coatings are added. The prototype cups, they noted, are about as strong as a typical retailer-bought cup or bottle.

In fact, several challenges remain earlier than the 10 billion tons of chitin produced by residing organisms annually may have a chance of becoming a sport-changer for the $375-billion-a-12 months plastics industry.

“All of it comes right down to price,” noted Ingber. “No matter you come up with within the lab needs to be scaled up.”

Ingber and Fernandez stated they have obtained quite a lot of patents, and are starting to attract curiosity from companies searching for to cut back their carbon footprint.

Two of the largest manufacturers of consumer goods, Procter & Gamble and Unilever, declined HuffPost requests for comment.

James Berge, principal and director for science and technology at HOK, a worldwide design, structure, engineering and planning firm, stated the new material to date seems “an economical stable material.”

“The flexibility to injection mold and cast the fabric with existing manufacturing technologies is a giant first hurdle and elementary for manufacturing feasibility,” Berge said.

Whereas optimistic, Amherst’s Vandenberg added an vital caution: “Just because something is natural doesn’t mean secure,” she said. “There’s arsenic in nicely water.”

Joel Tickner, an expert in inexperienced chemistry on the College of Massachusetts, Lowell, identified that new plastics — even these made from chitin — should endure testing “to make sure they’re really higher, and safer.”

The Meals and Drug Administration stated its approval is required for any new chitosan-based product which will contact meals. The Environmental Protection Company requires notification for manufacturing of different chitosan-derived materials.

“Chitin/chitosan gives a renewable, biobased feedstock alternative to conventional petroleum-primarily based synthetics,” the EPA stated in a statement to HuffPost, noting that the Presidential Inexperienced Chemistry Challenge Awards Program has received nominations for chitin-based applied sciences.

Many plant-primarily based bioplastics additionally present potential to revolutionize the plastics industry, noted Tickner. He highlighted the efforts of NatureWorks, which is turning sugar derived from corn and other crops into a material now employed on a small scale to make clothing, water bottles and other client merchandise.

Ingber and Fernandez said their bioplastic has benefits over different plant-based mostly versions. It would not compete with land or other assets for fundamental human needs. Many of the obtainable chitin comes from shrimp, which discard their shells each month or two. Seafood processing alone creates about one hundred fifty,000 tons of usable chitosan every year.

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