Biological Degradation of Polymers in the Environment
By John A. Glaser. Plastics in the Environment, 2019
84 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Polymers present to modern society remarkable performance characteristics desired by a wide range of consumers but the fate of polymers in the environment has become a massive management problem. Polymer applications offer molecular structures attractive to product engineers desirous of prolonged lifetime properties. These characteristics also figure prominently in the environmental lifetimes of polymers or plastics. Recently, reports of microbial degradation of polymeric materials offer new emerging technological opportunities to modify the enormous pollution threat incurred through use of polymers/plastics. A significant literature exists from which developmental directions for possible biological technologies can be discerned. Each report of microbial mediated degradation of polymers must be characterized in detail to provide the database from which a new technology developed. Part of the development must address the kinetics of the degradation process and find new approaches to enhance the rate of degradation. The understanding of the interaction of biotic and abiotic degradation is implicit to the technology development effort.
Subfields: Biomaterials, Organic Chemistry, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be1cfc341c1f712c00d3ba2c49c47a883ec15bfc
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In Biomaterials
In Organic Chemistry
In Pollution
Citations in the corpus
- Effect of microplastics in water and aquatic systems (2021, background): “Certain materials are subject to biotic degradation through fungi and bacteria and are imbibed or passively adsorbed by consumers at successive tropical levels after degradation, resulting in blockage of the gastrointestinal system (A. Glaser 2019).”