Plastic Degradation and Its Environmental Implications with Special Reference to Poly(ethylene terephthalate)

By Hayden Webb, Jaimys Arnott, R. Crawford, Elena P. Ivanova. 2012

838 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With increasing global consumption and their natural resistance to degradation, plastic materials and their accumulation in the environment is of increasing concern. This review aims to present a general overview of the current state of knowledge in areas that relate to biodegradation of polymers, especially poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET). This includes an outline of the problems associated with plastic pollution in the marine environment, a description of the properties, commercial manufacturing and degradability of PET, an overview of the potential for biodegradation of conventional polymers and biodegradable polymers already in production.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/03462ee35fb69ef1e82edac430bee722fbab9ccb

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In Biomaterials

1. Ren Wei
2. S. Zhong
3. Joshua M. Pearce
4. W. Zimmermann

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

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2. Ren Wei
3. J. Senevirathna
4. G. Thushari
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In Pollution

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Citations in the corpus

• Use of recycled plastics in concrete: A critical review. (2016, neutral): “Apart from PET, most types of common plastics (i.e. PP, PVC) are not biodegradable and have high chemical stability (Webb et al., 2012).”
• Biodegradation of Polyethylene by Green Photosynthetic Microalgae (2017, background): “J Bioremediat Biodegrad, an open access journal ISSN: 2155-6199 field of biodegradation of polymers, and given the vast metabolic potential of microorganisms [8].”
• Tightening the loop on the circular economy: Coupled distributed recycling and manufacturing with recyclebot and RepRap 3-D printing (2018, methodology): “Landfill, incineration and recycling are the three main methods to treat postconsumer plastics according to the principle of waste hierarchy in increasing order of environmental responsibility (Gertsakis and Lewis, 2003; Webb et al., 2012).”
• Microbial enzymes for the recycling of recalcitrant petroleum‐based plastics: how far are we? (2017, background): “…of the polymers has therefore a strong influence on their biodegradability (Urgun-Demirtas et al., 2007; Brueckner et al., 2008; Jenkins and Harrison, 2008; Eberl et al., 2009; Ronkvist et al., 2009; Horn et al., 2012; Webb et al., 2013; Restrepo-Fl orez et al., 2014; Wei et al., 2014a).”
• Enhanced Poly(ethylene terephthalate) Hydrolase Activity by Protein Engineering (2018, background): “In addition, this approach generates a large amount of substances that are toxic and harmful to the environment, and has the potential to cause secondary pollution [7,13].”
• Plastic pollution in the marine environment (2020, background): “Oxidative characteristics in the atmosphere and hydrolytic properties of seawater (salinity) profoundly affect the degradation rate of plastics (Webb et al., 2013), and a saline environment with prevailing lower temperature reduces the photo-degradation rate of plastics (Cole et al.”