Illustration by John Ueland

At Sonny Meyerhoeffer's plastics production plant in Mount Crawford, Virginia, only some ingredient bins contain the pea-size, petroleum-based pellets that are routinely melted down to create most of the world's plastic commodities. The others are full of chicken feathers.

This is no practical joke or shipping snafu. Feathers are rich in keratin, the same tough proteins that make up our hair and fingernails, and since last year, Meyerhoeffer's company, Eastern Bioplastics, has been grinding and mixing the feathers, turning them into biodegradable resins and composite.

Every year the U.S. poultry industry sheds up to 4.5 billion pounsd of feathers, most of which head to landfills or are cooked down into feed for other animals. Justin Barone, a Virginia Tech materials scientist and Meyerhoeffer's business partner, has spent years looking for ways to turn the fluffy castoffs into environmentally friendlier plastics, thereby reducing our dependence on oil. The Mount Crawford plant is one of the first to manufacture feather-based plastic on an industrial scale. At full capacity, which Meyerhoeffer expects to reach by the end of the year, it will replace an estimated 7,500 barrels of oil annually. (The United States currently consumes more than 19 million barrels a day.)

Of course, even if every last discarded feather were churned into plastic, there still wouldn't be enough to replace the 100 billion pounds of petroleum-based plastic products this country creates every year. But just as a combination of sustainable power sources will be needed to meet our energy needs without oil, feather-based plastics can be one prong in a larger strategy to replace traditional plastics with biological alternatives.

"We're finally realizing that we have to diversify," Barone says. "You don't put all your eggs in one basket."