Straws Made of Chicken Feathers?

Get a load of this headline from the BBC News: Chicken feathers suggested as basis for plastics.  Sounds like a good idea.  It’d make plastics “light as a feather” so to speak, and according to the article, the plastics industry would require less petroleum in the manufacturing process.

But wait a minute.  Would you eat from a spoon or drink from a cup made of chicken feathers?  The article indicated that manufacturers could also use hair, and fingernails which are composed of keratin to add strength and reduce the weight of plastics.  This is all good right?  Ecofriendly, or friendlier, even though plastics likely contain a ton of other chemicals with a half life of billions of years.  The thing is, if consumers knew plastics were made of chicken feathers, fingernails and hair, I think most would stop using straws, and plastic utensils and anything else made of plastic.  Unwittingly, the chemical engineers working for Big Plastics, in an effort to make their companies even more profitable, may have found just the right formula to destroy the industry.

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