Sustainable Use of Agri-Waste in the Production of Green Hybrid Composites

Sustainable development is all about satisfying the environmental, economic and social goals. The present scenario is of environment-friendly products. So, the agricultural waste coming from two crops (banana and rice) as reinforcement and polylactic acid (PLA) as matrix has been used to develop the hybrid (banana and rice husk) composite rods (as per ASTM standard) by extrusion technique with fiber fraction of 0% to 40% (v/v). Mechanical testing in terms of tensile, flexural and impact was done which showed increase of strength by increase in reinforcement where tensile strength of composite rod touched 44.56 MPa, flexural strength of 38.59 MPa and impact strength of 5.12 kJ/m2 (at 40% volume fraction) as compared to neat PLA sample that have tensile strength of 15.82 MPa, flexural 13.64 MPa and impact strength of 1.98 kJ/m2, respectively. So, overall good effect of reinforcement was observed that in turn paved way for the use of green waste in development of composites.