Growing environmental awareness and public focus on increasing amount of plastic waste generated as a result of increased usage has necessitated work on effective recycling systems.  However, recycling is difficult since the plastic waste is a mixture of plastics with different properties.

    Many countries have been focusing on waste management programs which include plastic waste reduction by development of biodegradable plastic material. Studies in this direction show that (a) Cellulose di-acetate based biodegradable plastics by co-polymerization of two different biodegradable chemicals based on aliphatic polyster
derivatives are stronger than polythenes, have high tensile strength, are completely biodegradable and release no harmful gases on incineration. and (b) Biopolymers produced by microorganisms including Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) and
Polylactic acids (PLA) plastic material  are completely degraded when thrown into landfills and would completely disappear in a period of few weeks or months and are not hardous to health.

Work is being done at the National Environmental Engineering Research
Institute, Nagpur for the use of activated sludge as a source of microorganisms capable of producing biodegradable plastics which will be cheaper than PHAs.  Also wastewaters generated from different industries have been characterized for their composition to test their efficacy for enhanced bioplastics production.

Such efforts to produce bioplastics would go a long way in effective utilization of available resources for production of a value-added product, PHA, thus reducing cost of the final product and at the same time solving the problem of waste disposal. 

Researched by Maninder