Microbial enzymes for the recycling of recalcitrant petroleum‐based plastics: how far are we?
By Ren Wei, W. Zimmermann. Microbial Biotechnology, 2017
692 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Petroleum‐based plastics have replaced many natural materials in their former applications. With their excellent properties, they have found widespread uses in almost every area of human life. However, the high recalcitrance of many synthetic plastics results in their long persistence in the environment, and the growing amount of plastic waste ending up in landfills and in the oceans has become a global concern. In recent years, a number of microbial enzymes capable of modifying or degrading recalcitrant synthetic polymers have been identified. They are emerging as candidates for the development of biocatalytic plastic recycling processes, by which valuable raw materials can be recovered in an environmentally sustainable way. This review is focused on microbial biocatalysts involved in the degradation of the synthetic plastics polyethylene, polystyrene, polyurethane and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Recent progress in the application of polyester hydrolases for the recovery of PET building blocks and challenges for the application of these enzymes in alternative plastic waste recycling processes will be discussed.
Subfields: Biomaterials, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e25f5b4d86dd5d81be7b0dd59f65665dc032b15
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In Biomaterials
In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
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Citations in the corpus
- Plastics: Environmental and Biotechnological Perspectives on Microbial Degradation (2019, background): “While a few reviews have recently been published focusing on the degradation of single types of plastic, only a few articles have addressed plastic degradation on a more global scale, addressing the degradation of several synthetic polymers (8).”
- Microbial and Enzymatic Degradation of Synthetic Plastics (2020, background): “The biodegradation pathways utilized by these two groups are significantly different (Wei and Zimmermann, 2017).”