IPB Students Create Bioplastic from Palm Oil Waste and Chitosan
Plastic waste pollutes the environment; both the land and the sea. The problem has become the problem of many, starting from researchers, academicians, and industry. The inability of plastic to be degraded causes toxicity to the environment and humans. It is caused by the fact that most of the plastic is made from petroleum-based synthetic polymer raw materials.
This pushes four IPB University students; Alifah Syahfitri, Sri Yustikasari Massijaya, Evi Natalia, and Sri Ramadani from the Forest Products Department, Faculty of Forestry to make bioplastics. This bioplastics is made to reduce the negative impact of synthetic plastic waste through the use of the most abundant biopolymers in nature using palm oil waste and chitosan.
“We made our bioplastic from natural ingredients which are chitosan and various nanocellulose from palm oil stem waste. The objective is to reduce the plastic waste and thus reducing the negative impacts to the environment,” said Alifah as the team leader.
From this innovation, Alifah and team won funding from Tanoto Foundation in the Tanoto Student Research Award (TSRA). This activity was carried out in order to gather and support the creative works of students. In this activity, Alifah and the team won 3rd place in the TSRA event at IPB University, mid-June.
“Alhamdulillah, we are very grateful to know that our research is granted a fund. This blessing from Allah made us very eager to do this. We hope that this research will be beneficial for many people, especially in dealing with the plastic waste problem that affects the environment and living things,” she said.
There are challenges and obstacles that must be faced by Alifah and her team during the research, namely the trial process and sample making, human resource constraints, fairly short time management, sample tests, and data processing activities.
In the future, Alifah and tim will represent IPB University in the national selection. “We hope that we can prepare our team maximally as the top three finalist from IPB University. InshaAllah we can give the best for IPB University,” she said.
