Faster-degrading plastic could promise cleaner seas

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Edge Guerrero
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Faster-degrading plastic could promise cleaner seas

Postby Edge Guerrero » Tue Apr 21, 2020 10:28 pm

Date: April 20, 2020
Source: Cornell University

Summary: To address plastic pollution plaguing the world's seas and waterways, chemists have developed a new polymer that can degrade by ultraviolet radiation.

"We have created a new plastic that has the mechanical properties required by commercial fishing gear. If it eventually gets lost in the aquatic environment, this material can degrade on a realistic time scale," said lead researcher Bryce Lipinski, a doctoral candidate in the laboratory of Geoff Coates, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell University. "This material could reduce persistent plastic accumulation in the environment."

Commercial fishing contributes to about half of all floating plastic waste that ends up in the oceans, Lipinski said. Fishing nets and ropes are primarily made from three kinds of polymers: isotactic polypropylene, high-density polyethylene, and nylon-6,6, none of which readily degrade.

"While research of degradable plastics has received much attention in recent years," he said, "obtaining a material with the mechanical strength comparable to commercial plastic remains a difficult challenge."

Coates and his research team have spent the past 15 years developing this plastic called isotactic polypropylene oxide, or iPPO. While its original discovery was in 1949, the mechanical strength and photodegradation of this material was unknown before this recent work. The high isotacticity (enchainment regularity) and polymer chain length of their material makes it distinct from its historic predecessor and provides its mechanical strength.

Lipinski noted that while iPPO is stable in ordinary use, it eventually breaks down when exposed to UV light. The change in the plastic's composition is evident in the laboratory, but "visually, it may not appear to have changed much during the process," he said.

The rate of degradation is light intensity-dependent, but under their laboratory conditions, he said, the polymer chain lengths degraded to a quarter of their original length after 30 days of exposure.

Ultimately, Lipinski and other scientists want to leave no trace of the polymer in the environment. He notes there is literature precedent for the biodegradation of small chains of iPPO which could effectively make it disappear, but ongoing efforts aim to prove this.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation's Center for Sustainable Polymers, the NSF-supported NMR Facility at Cornell, and the Cornell Center for Materials Research.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200420145031.htm
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Postby Masato » Thu Apr 23, 2020 4:02 pm

This sound encouraging... Is it still petroleum based?

I went to a health food store yesterday and they offered me biodegradable plastic bags to bag my groceries. Never saw that before, wonder how good it is, or if its the same stuff as the article

Plastic is evil, man. It comes from Petroleum/Oil/Rockefeller history, and is for sure maybe the worst of environmental disasters. I would be curious to see if there is a correlation between use of plastics in everyday life vs rise of cancer rates (?)


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