Science Daily April 21, 2021 The process developed by a team of researchers in the US (UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UMass Amherst) involves embedding polyester-eating enzymes in the plastic as it is made. When exposed to heat and water, an enzyme starts chomping the plastic polymer into its building blocks. In the case of biodegradable plastics, which are made primarily of the polyester known as polylactic acid, or PLA, it reduces it to lactic acid that can feed the soil microbes in compost. The polymer wrapping also degrades. The process eliminates microplastics, a byproduct of many chemical degradation […]
Category Archives: Plastic pollution
It’s snowing plastic
EurekAlert March 17, 2021 The quantification of micro/nanoplastics in complex environmental matrices is still a major challenge, notably for soluble ones. Researchers in Canada coupled laboratory-built nanostructures (zinc oxide, titanium oxide and cobalt) to mass spectrometry techniques to quantify micro/nanoplastics in water and snow matrices at picogram levels without sample pre-treatment. In parallel, they developed a technique to quantify micro/nanoplastics based on nanostructured laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (NALDI-TOF-MS), at ultra-trace levels. The detection limit is ∼5 pg for ambient snow. Soluble polyethylene glycol and insoluble polyethylene fragments were observed and quantified in fresh falling snow. Complementary physicochemical studies of […]