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Environmental Biodegradation of Plastics
Citation:
Glaser, John A. Environmental Biodegradation of Plastics. Departmental Colloquium, Department Of Chemistry, University of Cincinnati, CINCINNATI, Ohio, February 07, 2020.
Impact/Purpose:
Plastic debris pervades our landscape and water bodies. Our societal dependence on commercial and consumer forms of plastic serves to enlarge the uncontrolled disposal of plastic items to the land and water. The plastic refuse presents a host of environmental and ecological concerns. Recent research has reported that biological mechanisms may provide some unforeseen opportunities to engage biological degradation of plastics in a formal technology. The path to this end requires significant research that is focused on the information elements that are currently missing. The plastic degradation analytics are pivotal to the general discussion of the use of technology based on biodegradation. The analytical focus must unite the chemical and biological aspects of the biologically mediated degradation of plastics. Examples of possible technologies must be scrutinized for durability and avoidance of other environmental problems derived through its use. Society has widely recognized that general need to address this massive environmental problem. The ecological need for a useful technology is immediate and must be viewed as a response to human health and broad environmental concerns.
Description:
Our terrestrial landscape, lakes, rivers, and oceans are strewn with plastic pollution. Some 8300 million metric tons(Mt) of virgin plastics have been produced since the early 1950s. As of 2015, only some 9% of this mass has been recycled, with 12% incinerated and the remaining 79% assigned to landfills or carelessly distributed throughout the environment. Significant abiotic and biotic conditions exist to show that plastics are vulnerable to these forces. Weathering of polymers leads to structural defects but incomplete decay. Chemical and physical degradation processes contribute to the overall weathering process. Due to the chemical structure features of plastics, many compositions have been found to degrade slowly under biotic and abiotic conditions. It is important to have the proper criteria to judge the relative importance of the abiotic and biotic components. Analytical tools and techniques must be mustered to serve our demands to ascertain the relative importance of environmental factors to degrade plastics. This scrutiny may enable the formulation of enhanced treatment techniques to harness the environmental biodegradation of plastics. The fate of the weathered polymeric materials becomes quite important to the understanding of environmental plastic behavior. Interruption of acceleration degradation components of the weathering process may offer significant advatages to the quest of reducing the environmental impact of plastic materials. A more complete understanding of plastic daughter products of environmental degradation is required to more thoroughly understand the effectiveness of environmental plastic degradation. Therefore, the analytical chemistry and biological arsenal must be enhanced to provide the techniques to meet the investigative need of research devoted to plastics and their environmental fate. Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this abstract have not been formally disseminated By the USEPA and should not be construed to represent any agency determination or policy.