Nature Has A Promising Replacement For Hormone-Scrambling Plastics: Shrimp Shells

Javier Fernandez admits he's not a huge fan of chess. "I'm not very good either," he says.

Nevertheless, his queen, king, rook and knight are attracting a lot of attention.

The black and white chess pieces are made of plastic, but not the petroleum-based kind experts warn may be laden with hormone-scrambling chemicals. Rather, Fernandez and his colleagues molded the complex game pieces from a compostable material abundant in nature: Chitin.

It's the stuff of shrimp shells, insect armor and butterfly wings -- and now of a small collection of chess pieces, party cups and egg cartons in a Cambridge, Mass., lab.

Researchers created chess pieces to illustrate how you can make "virtually any 3D form with impressive precision." (Wyss Institute, Harvard University)

"It's so cheap and abundant," said Fernandez, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and co-author of a study on the material published in late February. "Besides vertebrates and plants, it's in almost every other living thing on Earth."

Meanwhile, leftovers from fossil fuel refiningcontinue to be used to build everything from chip clips and cell phones, to children's toys and sippy cups. Evidence suggests the chemicals that give these plastic products their characteristic hardiness or flexibility, such as phthalates and bisphenol A, can pose nasty consequences for human health. Although still hotly debated, most studies of BPA, for example, find that it may mimic or block the body's hormone messengers responsible for such critical processes as metabolism, growth and reproduction.