ALTERNATIVE TO PLASTICS

WHY WE NEED ALTERNATIVE METHODS TO PLASTICS?

Everything begins with chemistry. The most important industrial application of

chemistry is plastics. But it is not easy to avoid plastics from our life. Worldwide each
person uses 5kg of plastics/year. Plastics are very dangerous to animals and human
beings, because they are non-degradable, hence we need alternatives to plastics.

Fig 1: Water Pollution Caused By Non Biodegradable plastics

The most favourable alternatives to plastics are biodegradable

products& biopolymers. They are degradable with aerobic&anaerobic conditions.
This biodegradable method do not affect our aquatic life. Then oterwise recycling is a
most suitable method for our life.

BIODEGRADABLE PRODUCTS
Products which degrade upon disposal by the action of living organisms are called
'biodegradable products”. They can be broken down into their constituent natural
elements and absorbed by the environment.

1.THERMOPLASTIC STARCH:

Starch is annually renewable material derived from crops. Constituting about

50 percent of the bioplastics market, thermoplastic starch, such as plastarch material,
currently represents the most important and widely used bioplastic.
E.g. Copolymers of glycolide and lactide
 2. POLYLACTIC ACID(PLA) PLASTICS:

PLA not only resembles conventional petrochemical mass plastics in its

characteristics, but it can also be processed easily on standard equipment that already
exists for the production of conventional plastics.

3. POLYHYDROXYALKANOATES (PHA):

primary research shows that pha has a considerably low volume of the
biopolymer market, somewhere around 100,000 lbs. per year.

FERMENTATION METHOD:
RECYCLING PROCESS:

CONCLUSIONS:

The development of biodegradable products has led to the greening of

industrial production. Concerns about global climate change, pollution, dwindling
stocks of petroleum, and other factors have led materials scientists to reconsider the
virtues of bio-based materials. Breakthroughs in the genetic engineering of
metabolic pathways have yielded microbes that efficiently convert inexpensive feed
stocks (molasses, starch and waste lipids) to biopolymers. Cloning and expression of
genes in plants has created new possibilities for using photosynthesis to directly
synthesize polymers in plants.

PRESENTING AUTHORS:

P.SARAVANAN & C.LOGANATHAN

U.G CHEMISTRY DEPARTMENT
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE,MADURAI