This plastic’s main ingredient is wool

A new route to making supple, moldable materials from the tough protein keratin could lead to a sustainable replacement for some plastics ( Matter 2025, DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2025.102039). Keratin forms feathers, horns , and wool. As abundant food industry waste , it is a promising sustainable raw material for bioplastics. But the heavily cross-linked protein is difficult to process and typically results in brittle films. People use it as powder or add “a billion plasticizers so you lose all the mechanical properties of keratin,” says Giovanni Perotto , a materials scientist at the Italian Institute of Technology. Perotto and colleagues took advantage of the thiol groups on the cysteine amino acids in keratin. They thought they could link the thiols to carbon-carbon double bonds using a simple Michael-type addition. The researchers first extracted keratin by dissolving wool in an aqueous solution of urea and sodium metabisulfite, which creates a thick soup