Your fork could someday be made of sugar and wood powders and degrade on-demand

Single-use hard plastics are pervasive: utensils, party decorations and food containers, to name a few examples. These items pile up in landfills, and many biodegradable versions stick around for months, requiring industrial composting systems to fully degrade. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering have created a sturdy, lightweight material that disintegrates on-demand—and they made it from sugar and wood-derived powders.