Enhancing Durability of Banana Peel Bio-Plastic Using Acacia (Samanea saman) Seed Extract

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Plastic was one of the most picked up garbage in the whole world. It was assessed that over 300 million tons of plastic were produced around the world each year (Walter, 2014).Bio-plastic was the best product to lessen the pollution but not the best solution. The only hindrance of this bio-plastic was the lack of durability so that the researchers find a gap in how the bio-plastic increase its durability. The researcher discovered that the acacia seed extractcan be an enhancer of bio-plastic.This study aimed to introduce the potential of acacia seed extract to improve the toughness of the present banana peel bio-plastic.

METHODS

Centrifugation method was used to extract the protein of the acacia seed. For, the production of banana peel bio-plastic the researchers boiled, strained and decanted the banana peel and mixed it with glycerine and acacia seed extract, molded on a foil and then dried for two days. The durability of the plastics was tested using an improvised tensile strength test by adding weights gradually until it reaches its breaking point. Also, the study made use of a four-point Likert scale for the appearance and texture of the plastic. In accordance with the objectives, this utilized weighted mean and t-test of independent samples.

RESULTS

Each sample underwent three trials of tensile strength test. Banana peel bio-plastic with acacia seed extract takes an average of 2.2867 N to be completely torn down while the banana plastic without extract has an average of 1.6333 N. Using t-test independent, the researchers obtained a t-value of 2.8328 against a critical value of 2.776 which falls under the rejection region which means that there is a significant difference between the two plastics.

DISCUSSIONS

Since banana peel bio-plastic with acacia seed extract exhibited higher durability than the other group, it was concluded that acacia seed extract was able to enhance the durability of the banana peel bio-plastic. As the results indicated, the researchers settled that banana peel bio-plastic with acacia seed extract can be a good replacer to the oil-based polymers and can be further enriched to be a usable bio plastic product.