What is the difficulty research and development of seawater degradation materials?

At present, the international Shanghai water degradation materials related research has just started, many people blindly hope that biodegradable materials to solve the problem of plastic pollution in the oceans.

National Institute of Physical and Chemical Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences National Engineering Research Center has long been engaged in the development of degradable plastics, industrialization and application of research, in view of the current increasingly serious problem of marine plastic pollution in the country launched the first marine degradation materials.

However, the degradation of polyester composites is essentially due to the enzymatic hydrolysis of the polymer under the action of microorganism-secreting enzymes. Environmental microbial species, quantity, temperature, etc. It also need to meet certain requirements in order to get rapid degradation.

Compared to the terrestrial environment, the marine environment is characterized by its high water, salt, high pressure, low temperature, mobile and dilute nutrients. In addition to the density of marine microorganisms in the offshore area slightly larger, the density of marine microorganisms in the oceans are small, the average is generally a few to dozens of per milliliter, and degradation of the compost process per liter of soil count hundreds of millions of micro-organisms Than, almost negligible. Different degradation environment and degradation conditions make the degradation performance of aliphatic polyester material in seawater significantly different from composting process.

The results show that the current degradation of biodegradable polyester materials in seawater and composting have great differences in seawater is difficult to have biodegradable conditions, most of the polyester material degradation cycle in seawater is very slow, and even difficult to degrade. In general, it is clear that the devastating effects of the currently used non-degradable plastic products on the marine environment have been widely recognized and that research on seawater degradation materials is being actively carried out to improve the situation. And also, we should pay more attention to the plastic recycling such as polystyrene recycling.

However, just as the progress made in using "plastic ban" on land to replace biodegradable plastics with slow biodegradable plastics has been slow, developing biodegradable plastic products to prevent and treat marine plastic contaminants has only just begun. The single biodegradable materials can not be directly applied to sea water to effectively solve the problem of marine plastic pollution. We can also take other action as recycling plastic through plastic melting machine.