Environmental impact assessment of sound absorbing nonwovens based on chicken feathers waste

Abstract Chicken feathers (CFs) are currently a biogenic solid waste generated on a large scale and around the world. Its valorization could provide a great opportunity to manufacture environmentally friendly materials and increase the profit of poultry processors. The aim of this study was to fabricate sound absorbing nonwoven materials using CFs wastes to evaluate both the environmental impact of their fabrication processes using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology and the acoustic performance and to compare the results with a conventional insulating material such as stone wool (SW). The study showed that it was possible to fabricate CFs-wool nonwovens incorporating up to 50% w/w of CFs. The new material showed similar acoustic properties to those of SW, even behaving better for frequencies below 2200 Hz. LCA study showed that the environmental impacts decrease when the amount of CFs increases in those nonwoven materials containing CFs-wool, except for abiotic depletion and eutrophication impact categories. However, despite the synthetic nature of the SW, SW only presented worse environmental performance than the CFs based nonwoven materials for few impact categories (depletion of abiotic resources, human toxicity and photo-oxidant formation) due to the negative contribution caused by the incorporation of wool (W) into the nonwoven materials.