THE next time we peel prawns at the dinner table, the shells will probably go straight into the bin. We rarely give them another thought. Yet those discarded shells contain a natural material that researchers are exploring as a possible ingredient for biodegradable plastics. At Universiti Malaya's Faculty of Engineering, researchers have investigated how prawn shell waste can be converted into chitosan, a natural biopolymer, and used to produce biodegradable plastic films. The work offers a practical example of the circular economy: turning something typically treated as waste into a useful resource. This matters because Malaysia faces two waste challenges at once. Food waste makes up a substantial share of municipal solid waste, while plastics continue to accumulate in landfills and the environment. The seafood industry also generates large amounts of biological waste, including prawn shells that have relatively little value once the edible portions have been removed. Those shells, however, contain chitin, a naturally occurring substance that can be processed into chitosan. Chitosan has attracted growing scientific interest because it is biodegradable, biocompatible and versatile, with potential applications ranging from food packaging and agriculture to biomedical and environmental technologies. In our study, chitosan was extracted from discarded prawn shells...