The future of plastics: degradation or regeneration?

The Institute of Biodegradable Materials reported that degradable plastics and recycled plastics are two potential options to solve the problem of white pollution.

1. Degradable plastic is suitable for packaging and agricultural film

Degradable plastic refers to the plastic whose properties can meet the requirements of use performance, remain unchanged during the storage period, and can be degraded into environmentally friendly substances under natural environmental conditions after use. Degradable plastics have its advantages in performance, practicability, degradability and safety. In terms of performance, degradable plastics can reach or exceed the performance of traditional plastics in some specific fields; In terms of practicality, degradable plastics have similar application performance and sanitary performance with similar traditional plastics; In terms of degradability, degradable plastics can be rapidly degraded in natural environment (specific microorganism, temperature and humidity) after use, and become easily used fragments or non-toxic gases to reduce the impact on the environment; In terms of safety, the substances produced or remained in the degradation process of degradable plastics are harmless to the environment and will not affect the survival of human beings and other organisms. At present, the biggest obstacle to replacing traditional plastics is that the production cost of degradable plastics is higher than that of similar traditional plastics or recycled plastics. Therefore, degradable plastics have more advantages in application fields such as packaging, agricultural film, etc., which have short service time, are difficult to recover and separate, have low requirements for performance, and have high requirements for impurity content.

2. Recycled plastics are suitable for areas with low sanitary requirements

Recycled plastics refer to the plastic raw materials obtained after processing waste plastics by physical or chemical methods such as pretreatment, melting granulation, modification, etc. The biggest advantage of recycled plastics is that its price is cheaper than that of new materials and degradable plastics, and it can only process certain properties of plastics and produce corresponding products according to different performance requirements. When the number of cycles is not too much, recycled plastics can maintain similar performance to traditional plastics, or can maintain stable performance by mixing recycled materials with new materials. However, after many cycles, the performance of recycled plastics has decreased greatly or to the extent that they cannot be used. In addition, it is difficult for recycled plastics to maintain good sanitary performance on the premise of ensuring economy. Therefore, recycled plastics are suitable for fields where the number of cycles is small and the requirements for hygienic performance are not high.