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Sawdust-Based Foam Could Offer a Sustainable Alternative to Polystyrene

Waste swept off a sawmill floor, plant-based binders, and beeswax create foams with potential for sustainable packaging and building materials.

Newswise — Polystyrene — common in packing peanuts and box inserts — is manufactured from fossil fuels. To develop a sustainable alternative, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Polymer Materials tested an unconventional starting material: sawdust. Their prototype foams incorporated cellulose binders and other additives to form rigid or flexible materials, and some versions matched polystyrene’s strength and impact resistance. A simple beeswax coating made them water-resistant, producing biobased foams with potential for packaging and building materials.  “It can be exciting to use waste products as a starting point for materials fabrication, rather than a chemical catalog,” says Todd Emrick, the corresponding author of the study. He adds that the first author of the paper, Isha Farook, drove to nearby farms and sawmills asking if the research team could have their sawdust waste. Both researchers were pleased and surprised that, once it was dried, this waste sawdust created well-performing foams. 

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