ask our experts about
your home-made bioplastic project!

Plastic itself is created by combining several ingredients: polymers, plasticizers, and various additives that give the final product its properties.

What most people consider the "primary" or key component to a plastic is the polymer. Polymers are long molecules made up of chains of shorter segments. If you chain a lot of glucose molecules together, you get a starch polymer:

http://pslc.ws/macrog/kidsmac/starch.htm

Of course, if you are talking about a final product made out of a "starch-based plastic", you are talking about more than just starch polymers by themselves.

For one thing, plastics that use starch as their only polymer are usually terrible: low strength, bad water resistence. So usually starch is blended with other polymers, like poly(vinyl alcohol) or polyethylene or polycaprolacton e. They can also be blended with petroleum polymers, resulting in a plastic that is really only PARTIALLY a "bioplastic."

You also need a plasticizer, like glycerol or sorbitol. These have their own chemical structures and mix with the polymer to produce the final properties of the plastic.