Recently, natural fibers become attractive to automotive industry as an alternative reinforcement for glass fiber reinforced thermoplastics. Additionally, natural fiber components in the automotive industry can provide numerous advantages compared to synthetic conventional such as reduction of weight and cost, recyclability, renewability and in addition to eco-efficiency. Thus, the use of natural fibers in the automotive industry has shown increasingly stringent environmental criteria. Furthermore, amongst grouped bast fibers such as flax, hemp, jute, ramie, and kenaf; kenaf fiber is seen as a potential natural fiber with robust mechanical properties. Kenaf fiber had been explored to enhance desired mechanical properties as automotive structural components. As usual, natural fibres have some issues and disadvantages when used as reinforcements for polymeric composites. Therefore, some modification performed on fibers such as chemical treatment was carried out. In addition, the use of a coupling agent and a plasticizer can also increase fiber-matrix adhesive bonding.

Recently, natural fibers have become attractive materials to engineers, scientists, and researchers as an alternative reinforcement for biocomposites. In this study, polylactic acid/abutilon natural straw biocomposites with various abutilon straw weight fractions were prepared by melt blending. The differential scanning calorimetric (DSC) results showed a significant influence of the abutilon straw on the melting behavior of PLA, even at the low abutilon straw contents. The dynamic mechanical analysis demonstrated that the storage modulus, as well as tan delta of the biocomposites, increased when the abutilon straw content increases, which indicates better interaction between abutilon natural straw and PLA. The incorporation of abutilon straw into biocomposites provided favorable changes in rheology related to the matrix. SEM observation revealed good dispersion of the abutilon straw in PLA.