Chapter 8 **Biocomposites from Colombian Sugarcane Bagasse with Polypropylene: Mechanical, Thermal and Viscoelastic Properties 131**

Miguel Ángel Hidalgo-Salazar, Fernando Luna-Vera and Juan Pablo Correa-Aguirre

Preface

dividual starting materials.

safe and sustainable manner.

The old quote from the renowned psychiatrist C. G. Jung, who stated that "the whole is more than just the sum of its individual parts", can also be applied to the field of composite materials. As a matter of fact, the assembly and processing of basic materials, both of natural and/or artificial origin, can create innovative materials with completely novel properties and characteristics, which are often not expected *a priori* when studying the properties of the in‐

Nowadays, we come across composite materials in almost all situations of our daily life. This may happen during shopping, when we buy food enveloped in multi-layer plastic composites and carry it home in carrier bags made of a composite material. Composites can accompany us when making sports in wintertime dressed in carbon fiber clothing, in our automobiles, where composites are used to reduce vehicle weight and to reduce CO2 emis‐ sions, or when we are grabbing our smartphone or tablet, which is most probably protected by an injection molded plastic-based composite. As another example, when I visited a scien‐ tific conference in France last year, coffee was offered in a cup consisting of an injection molded thermoplastic starch–bagasse composite material, which constitutes a sustainable al‐ ternative to petrochemical disposable cups. Moreover, every carpenter, architect, and han‐ dyman knows about the performance benefits of reinforced wood composites, widely used wood materials with high strength and dimensional stability with applications *inter alia* in construction and the furniture industry; hence, we live in houses where composite materials are omnipresent. In addition, reinforcing plastics with glass fibers offers options to generate high-performance glass fiber composites, which are applied in the construction sector, the leisure industry, as glass tapes on boats and ships, or in oil and gas lift systems. It might also be that, as I did this morning, the respected reader of this chapter even uses extra firm dog leashes made of glass fiber composites to walk his or her dog. As another example from the construction sector, concrete composite materials are used there, in which the relatively low tensile strength and ductility of concrete are compensated by the inclusion of reinforcement materials, which provides for enhanced tensile strength and/or ductility. Only during the last few years have concrete composites started to attract global attention also as the novel materials of choice to stabilize contaminated biological or soil materials; this application even provides the possibility to finally dispose materials contaminated by radionuclides in a

As a biotechnologist, I became personally fascinated by special new biocomposite materials, which were produced by our project partners about ten years ago. These biocomposites were based on a matrix of microbial polyhydroxyalkanoate bioplastics, which we produced in bioreactors by feeding bacteria with carbon-rich waste streams. Now, these bioplastics were processed by our project partners together with inexpensive renewable resources like
