Advantages And Disadvantages Of Bioplastic

Bioplastic is the term used for plastic derived from renewable resources (Machmud et al. 2013). Bioplastic generally used as a substitute to overcome the petroleum-based plastic and to design new environmentally friendly products. One of the innovation is the formation of the bioplastic from agar or known as seaweed that resulted in a flexible, thin, vinyl-like plastic sheet. Seaweed are a form of algae. In term of bioplastics, it refer to the red algae which known as red seaweed. Agar is the specific chemical, which can extracted from red seaweed in rich. There are some concerns issue about emerging bioplastic made from seaweed consuming the chemical agar, which taken out from the seaweed. Usually, agar is used in food industry as food additive in sweets, desserts, beverages, ice-cream and health foods. Agar also used as a non-food additive in toothpaste, cosmetics, and adhesives. Plastics or bioplastics are composed of three basic components which are the polymers, plasticizers, and the additives. The polymers will give plastic strength, plasticizers will give

Bioplastic prepared from red algae and from commercial agar at different agar and glycerol concentrations was transparent, smooth and firm, however films with low agar concentration are more fragile than those with a higher agar concentration. With increasing heat, algal bioplastic weight loss, increases proportionally with glycerol concentration. However, the weight loss is inversely proportional to agar contents. The percentage of weight loss increases gradually with the increase of temperature. Water and liquid holding capacity are proportional with commercial agar contents. For algal agar, the values are relatively high compared by commercial agar. At a high glycerol concentration algae bioplastic is clearly less permeable to water than commercial agar. At low agar contents bioplastic demonstrated very low water