Plastic pollution today is a worldwide issue with more than 300 million tons produced annually, and more than 90% of this plastic ends up in the trash or ocean. Unfortunately, plastics take hundreds of years to degrade in environmental conditions and break down into microplastics, which are consumed and travel up the food chain. This project addresses these issues by creating marine-degradable, water-soluble polymers with the addition of various additives to enhance the resulting film properties. Mineralization rates of synthetically modified celluloses were also evaluated under compost and wastewater conditions. Synthetic modification reduced mineralization rates by at least an order of magnitude relative to natural cellulose, indicating that polymers with a low degree of substitution would enable high degradability in the final film. A prototypical agriculturally-derived film mineralized with a half-life of only a few days in marine and compost conditions.

Highly marine-degradable, water-soluble packaging films

ACS Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting

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