Researchers have developed a new biodegradable packaging material for hamburgers that could replace fast-food restaurants’ paperboard
clamshells–the same paperboard that pushed polystyrene containers out of the market years ago.
The new material, which is made of wheat and feels like dense Styrofoam, could also be used to make disposable coffee cups, plates, supermarket meat trays, and carryout boxes, U.S. Department of Agriculture chemist Geoffrey A. R. Nobes reported.
Nobes and his colleagues, who work for the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Albany, Calif., made the new material by molding and baking a dough-like concoction of wheat starch and fibers from wheat straw. Afterward, the scientists examined the material with a scanning electron microscope and tested it for flexibility, density, and strength. They found that their new material could form a clamshell package that’s stronger and insulates better than paperboard, although not quite as well as polystyrene.