Imagine a shopping bag with the strength of Kevlar® but the biodegradability of whatever’s sitting at the bottom of your crisper.
Year 2020 marks 100 years of modern plastic and an undesirable environmental impact, but with the right chemistry, our old love affair with plastics could be reignited by new research into intelligent polymers that break down on command.
Dr Hendrik Frisch from QUT’s ’s Soft Matter Laboratory is developing an innovative technique to make tailored, remotely controllable plastics and other polymers.
“Many current biodegradable shopping bags still have a very limited biodegradability under real world conditions, especially in marine environments,” Frisch said.
“Our research goal is to produce fully biodegradable plastics so even microplastics are recognised by microorganisms as food.”
Frisch’s research will combine the radical polymerisation method used to make plastics with the natural building blocks of peptides to create a new class of high-end hybrid polymers.
The new polymerization technique would be compatible with today’s polymer production methods and thus contribute to a move towards more sustainable plastic materials, according to Frisch.
The full article can be found here on Medium.