Plastic wastes scattered over earth environments are causing ecological damages. Ghost fishing is unexpectedly happening to catch marine creatures by fishing gears such as nets or long lines lost, dumped, or abandoned, without anyone profiting from the catches. If the drifting fishing gears automatically corrode and disappear by natural function under marine environment, such a tragic problem will be solved.<br/>We developed a BioNylon which is durable at use but are disintegrated under external stimuli such as sun-light irradiation, sea water, and/ormicroorganism action, by using a diacidic biomonomer itaconic acid (IA) which is a multifunctional biomolecule mass-produced by fermentation. We used salt-monomers composed of IA and various diamines. These salts were thermally polycondensed into polyamides in the presence of sodium dihydrogen phosphate after aza-Michael addition, to create a pyrrolidone ring in the polymer main-chain (Fig). The polyamides with molecular weights ranging over 28 000 showed high thermal and mechanical performances. In addition, the polyamides gradually became hydrophilic to disintegrate by increasing the degree of ring-opening reaction of the pyrrolidone (Fig). The ring-opening reaction was induced by sea water and enhanced under ultra-violet irradiation, which is very important for development of environmentally-disintegrating fishing gears to avoid the ghost-fishing. Moreover our researches are extended to clarify the low toxicity of oligomers formed in the process of degradation.

Preparation of itaconic acid-derived bionylon having degradation switch

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