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Bioplastics and plastics recycling

We can­not ima­gine our daily life without plastics. Gen­er­ally, the day starts and ends with a tooth­brush, typ­ic­ally com­pletely made of plastics. Plastics take over vary­ing tasks, like pack­aging for the pro­tec­tion of food or medi­cine ensur­ing the products’ hygiene and dur­ab­il­ity. As plastics barely con­duct heat, houses are isol­ated with cor­res­pond­ing insu­lat­ing mater­i­als to avoid heat loss. Poly­mer com­pon­ents almost do not cor­rode, are light-weighted but dur­able and thus are res­ist­ant to many out­side influ­ences over a long peri­od. Appar­el made of syn­thet­ic fiber tex­tiles or of syn­thet­ic fiber com­pon­ents can provide com­fort­able wear­ab­il­ity prop­er­ties as well as func­tion­al­it­ies such as water repel­lency and/​or breathability. 

How­ever, we should not over­see the dis­ad­vant­ages of poly­mers and their occur­ring haz­ards. Imme­di­ate advant­age­ous prop­er­ties, like out­stand­ing dur­ab­il­ity, could be a tre­mend­ous dis­ad­vant­age if it is dis­posed in nature. Then, poly­mers are only degraded extremely slowly in nature and will remain as waste for cen­tur­ies to come. In addi­tion, we can nowadays find nano plastic particles every­where: added in tooth­paste or deter­gents, to improve its clean­ing impact, or in cos­met­ics to boost the cov­er­ing power. 


Biopoly­mers make the difference

Next to these envir­on­ment­al and health haz­ards, there remain oth­er non-solved func­tion­al­ity defi­cien­cies related to petro-chem­ic­al plastics. For instance, com­pound sys­tems from dif­fer­ent plastics are required to achieve var­ied bar­ri­er effects in pack­aging to pro­tect food. These sys­tems lead to a lim­ited recyc­lab­il­ity and lastly to a ​“down­cyc­ling”, as these mater­i­als, pro­duced at great effort, can­not be sep­ar­ated at their end of life. 

There­fore, it is import­ant to sub­sti­tute petro-chem­ic­al plastic products with envir­on­ment­ally friendly altern­at­ives at large scale as soon as pos­sible. These altern­at­ives must ensure the pos­it­ive applic­a­tion prop­er­ties of plastic mater­i­als in daily use and must not lead to the men­tioned, neg­at­ive envir­on­ment­al impacts and health haz­ards. ​“Bioplastics” lend them­selves as these altern­at­ives due to their nearly sim­il­ar char­ac­ter­ist­ics, related mater­i­al prop­er­ties and man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cesses. On top of that, we can expect prop­er­ties (e.g., bar­ri­er effects) of cer­tain biopoly­mers that can­not be met by petro-chem­ic­al plastics. The most well-known, tech­nic­ally usable, bio-based poly­mers com­prise poly­lactide (PLA), poly­butyl-suc­cin­ate (PBS), an poly­sac­char­ides like starch and poly­hy­droxyalkanoate (PHA).


Part­ners

Net­works

  • BioPlastik

    In the ​“BioPlastik” cooper­a­tion net­work, part­ners from industry and aca­demia work togeth­er under the man­age­ment of IBB Net­zwerk GmbH. The…

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  • Plastics Recyc­ling

    With the newly estab­lished ​“Plastics Recyc­ling” net­work, we would like to rep­res­ent the entire value chain. Thus, among oth­ers, suppliers…

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