Environmental impact of chicken feathers based polypropylene composites developed for automotive and stationary applications and comparison with glass-fibre analogues

Abstract

In last decades, there has been an interest in using biogenic wastes and by-products as fillers or reinforcements to produce polymer composites. Hence, new composites materials based on a blend of biogenic chicken feathers (CFs) and polypropylene (PP) are proposed in this work and compared, from the environmental point of view, with currently used materials as neat PP and PP reinforced with glass-fibres (PP-GF). A Cradle-to-Grave Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was performed in order to compare the environmental impact of these three materials when being used either for automotive or stationary applications. The mechanical properties of each material were taken into account to calculate the equivalent mass of each industrial application and the use phase and end of life (EoL) were included in the LCA study. The results showed that, for automotive applications and for all the materials studied (PP-GF, PP-CFs and PP) the use phase has a great contribution to the environmental impact categories considered, proving that the new developed material based on CFs (PP-CFs) would be appropriate for stationary applications but not for mobile applications as automotive ones. In addition, the EoL scenario considered, i.e. incineration with energy recovery, has proven to provide extra environmental credits