Valorisation of chicken feathers: Application in paper production

Reducing waste materials through reuse has in the recent past contributed to sustainable manufacturing in many industries. With the development of large-scale poultry farming, the treatment of large amounts of chicken feathers has become a problem and threatened its use as a renewable resource. This paper examines the use of chicken feathers in the paper making process; a process which would traditionally use wood as the raw material. The effects of combining feather fibre and wood pulp on paper performance were studied and compared to the properties of handsheets made with 100% wood pulp. With the increase of feather content, properties such as tightness, tensile index and bursting index decreased, whilst air permeability improved. There was no significant difference in water absorbency between various chicken feather/wood pulp handsheet samples however, the water absorbency started to decrease above 80% of chicken feather content. This could potentially open up a new avenue for the use of chicken feathers in applications that are meant to tolerate high humidity conditions, e.g., packaging products.