Biodegradability of Plastics

By Y. Tokiwa, Buenaventurada P. Calabia, C. U. Ugwu, S. Aiba. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2009

1,581 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Plastic is a broad name given to different polymers with high molecular weight, which can be degraded by various processes. However, considering their abundance in the environment and their specificity in attacking plastics, biodegradation of plastics by microorganisms and enzymes seems to be the most effective process. When plastics are used as substrates for microorganisms, evaluation of their biodegradability should not only be based on their chemical structure, but also on their physical properties (melting point, glass transition temperature, crystallinity, storage modulus etc.). In this review, microbial and enzymatic biodegradation of plastics and some factors that affect their biodegradability are discussed.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08df4503e6e0402f0d1b6a81cfc28e811f7e36fc

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Citations in the corpus

Persistence of Plastic Litter in the Oceans (2015, background): “With a simple substrate such as glucose, the products depend on whether the process is aerobic or anaerobic (Tokiwa et al. 2009):”
Microplastics in fisheries and aquaculture (2017, background): “…or successively; however, caution must be taken when considering bio-based plastics, as those containing variable proportions of both renewable and petrochemical carbons can also be labelled as “bio-based plastics”, but are not easily biodegradable (Tokiwa et al., 2009; Sekiguchi et al., 2011).”
The Mediterranean Plastic Soup: synthetic polymers in Mediterranean surface waters (2016, neutral): “It is considered biodegradable in terrestrial environment, with a degradation time of 6–12 days in laboratory conditions 43 , while some some signs of degradation appeared after 12 months in the marine environment 44 .”
(Nano)plastics in the environment - Sources, fates and effects. (2016, background): “…(Artham and Doble, 2008), due to the action of secreted enzymes (Lambert et al., 2014), resulting in the cleaving of the polymeric chain via hydrolytic mechanisms (Palmisano and Pettigrew, 1992), processes that take place both in the aquatic environment and in soils (Orhan and Büyükgüngör, 2000).”
Microbial Degradation of UV-Pretreated Low-Density Polyethylene Films by Novel Polyethylene-Degrading Bacteria Isolated from Plastic-Dump Soil (2018, neutral): “Although products made from oxo-biodegradable polymers have been introduced into the market, none of them is efficiently biodegradable in landfills After degradation nonpolymeric fractions, these plastic parts may disperse in the environment but do not continue to degrade at any appreciable rate reg”