Upswing for natural materials

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Natural, sustainable, climate-neutral: well-informed consumers demand high standards today from every-day products. To meet this growing environmental awareness almost every industry is now producing materials which are based on renewable resources. With increasing natural oil prices this field offers interesting economic prospects over the coming years. Messe Erfurt has recognised this theme for years and is offering the growing industry an important platform this year for the 7th time with the internationally renowned symposium "Materials made of renewable resources".

Process engineers, chemists, producers and primary material experts discuss new ideas, manufacturing processes and products in the promising sector of the future. The symposium with its high-calibre contributors, at which about 50 experts from ten countries speak, has a range of themes which is divided into three sections: fibre-reinforced composites, biodegradable polymers as well as adhesives, wood and other technologies.

The demands on many every-day commodities are very high. For example the coffee machine, "must be durable, it must not smell and above all it must meet high fire protection requirements", says Katrin Müller from the Thuringia Institute for Textiles and Plastics Research (TITK e.V) in Rudolstadt. "After all the coffee should be made without burning down the kitchen". Therefore the demands on the technical parameters of the housing material are very complex making the use of natural fibre-reinforced bioplastics accordingly ambitious and challenging in this field. "We have tested how far natural fibre-reinforced bioplastics can be used with household equipment", says Katrin Müller. "Our priority was to show what breadth of possibilities of use there is at all for bioplastics and what technical limits exist." In her speech the material scientist will mainly address the thermal behaviour, ageing and fire behaviour of different composites.

Just like household equipment modern wood materials must fulfil high technical but also health requirements. Important components of wood materials are binding agents. Up until now these have been produced either from urea-formaldehyde or phenol-formaldehyde. The need is great; about four million tons a year are processed in Germany alone. These amounts can now be replaced by newly developed binding agents based on vegetable proteins.

The technology company Animox from Berlin has developed a protein powder that replaces phenol-formaldehyde by up to a quarter. Wood materials in which the binding agent produced from renewable resources is used show no physical-mechanical disadvantages, according to Andreas Weber from the Dresden Institute for Wood Technology. The wood and fibre materials engineer is presenting his investigations on the topic at the Erfurt symposium. He comes to the conclusion that directly working in the proteins during the production of glue is better than adding them afterwards; an important finding for a large-scale technical implementation which still does not exist.

There is a big upswing at the moment in the biopolymers field. Harald Käb, Secretary General of the European Bioplastics Industry Association will refer to this in his opening speech at naro.tech. Käb is expecting production of 500, 000 tons of bio-based and biodegradable plastics Europe-wide for the current year.

The trend is rising. There are good reasons for this, which becomes especially clear with the example of mulch film. "Nowadays the food trade industry demands the use of mulch film from salad producers, to prevent the disagreeable remains of sand on salad leaves", explains Christoph Straeter, Executive Board of the Research Foundation for Biodegradable Materials (FBAW e.V.). "With DIN norm degradable film, which exists for different cultures in different thicknesses, the vegetable farmers have less trouble than with conventional plastics. They can work the film into the ground with the rotary plough without any problem after the harvest and after a precisely definable time the material has rotted."

This is not only climate and environmentally friendly but already more economical today than the use of conventional films based on natural oil. The films are manufactured based on starch or protein. In 2007 gardeners used the biodegradable film on about 4000 hectares all over Germany.

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