Degradable plastics from renewable resources
Purpose: The annual output of petrochemical plastics of the global production from crude oil is more than 300 million tonnes. But after their useful life as plastics materials they will be disposed in landfills, dumpsites, or delivered to composting plants or to incinerators. The degradability in general is very slow, in the case of landfills we are expecting to last hundreds of years. Therefore, during the last years new plastics were developed, plastics from renewable resources and biologically degradable by micro organisms. Are these new products really environmentally friendly, how can we test the degradability and how is the usability of those products in technical application? Methods: A short introduction in the history and chemistry of degradable plastics is followed by the description of our research with very new degradable plastics from lignin, a by-product in the cellulose pulping process for papermaking. The degradability of this product was tested in aerobic conditions with respirometric tests and also in a composting process. Results: In the respirometric tests we found for the different products a degradation rate of about 50％ up to 100 ％ in a period of 120 days. Composting tests also show the biological degradability. Also technical parameters for using these new plastics in normal technical applications e.g. in car industry or for household facilities have been a part of our research. Main conclusions: The usability for many applications seems to be really good. As this new material is from renewable resources, the degradation process will not have any influence to the greenhouse effect.
degradable plastics degradability tests renewable resources
Klaus Fischer Jingjing Huang
Institute for Sanitary Engineering, Water Quality and Solid Waste Management, University of Stuttgart, Germany, D -70569 Stuttgart
国际会议
北京
英文
536-541
2010-05-17（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）