With ever-growing plastic pollution, there has been a significant push to find alternate green materials. These green products are expected to generate less or zero carbon footprint, which has directed efforts towards using natural resources as raw materials. Starch stands out as one of the natural resources which hold potential to produce the alternate plastics. In this study, Starch has been explored for its use as a thermoplastic material. The contrasting natures of starch have been studied, namely amylose and amylopectin dominated starches. Further thermoplastics made from these starches were reactively extruded with current commercial grade plastics to produce sustainable plastic solutions. The manufacturing using reactive extrusion, downstream processing and characterization (eg. FTIR, TGA and soxhlet extraction) of thermoplastic starch and PBAT or PETG blends was established. These blends were designed to contain 30% starch by weight. The more linear, high amylose content thermoplastic starch (MTPS) produced blends with PETG with acceptable decline in mechanical properties as compared to regular amylose content thermoplastic starch (RMTPS). On the other hand, RMTPS had higher grafting efficiency (56%) than MTPS (35%) when it was reactively extruded with PBAT. In addition, the covalent nature of the grafted bond was established in starch grafted PBAT using acid hydrolysis and glucose detection.
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