Cassava roots. Bioplastic from cassava starch is said to be as tough as traditional plastics made of petroleum.
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Scientists develop biodegradable plastic from cassava starch

Brazilian scientists have developed a new technique to generate a biodegradable plastic as strong as traditional ones made of petroleum. Bioplastics are less harmful to the environment and could help tackle pollution.

A team of scientists in Brazil has developed a biodegradable plastic that could be used for food packaging or carrier bags by applying ozone gas to cassava starch. The ozone (O3) gas changes the molecular properties of the starch from the root vegetable to produce a bioplastic 30 per cent tougher than those made of the starch of potato, rice or maize, the researchers say.

Carla Ivonne La Fuente Arias, a chemistry engineer at the University of São Paulo’s Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture, told SciDev.Net: “Our tests indicate that this new technique is able to generate a biodegradable plastic as strong as traditional ones made of petroleum.”

The ozone gas has also enabled them to improve the transparency of the cassava-based plastic, according to Arias, lead author of the study published in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules.

Arias said she and her team had requested the patent for their invention and were in talks with a number of companies about developing the technology, but the cost of production costs remains unclear. “At the moment, it will undoubtedly be higher than the cost of producing traditional plastics,” she says. “However, it should drop when produced on a large scale.”

Bioplastics are considered less harmful to the environment because they may be decomposed by the action of living organisms, carbon dioxide (CO2), biomass or water.

Arias is confident that the new material has potential to help tackle the rampant consumption of plastics and the pollution generated by their improper disposal.

However, Alexander Turra, a biologist at the University of São Paulo’s Oceanographic Institute, believes that the issue of plastic waste is more complex. “The pollution caused by plastics is related to the way the global economy is structured and also society’s consumption logic, which is, in turn, relates to the way garbage is discarded,” he says.

“It is essential to think about this in order to change consumer behaviours, even if it involves biodegradable waste,” Turra points out, although he recognises that “this new technological solution is important, and it may act as a palliative measure for the environment”.

300 million tonnes of plastic waste is produced every year

An estimated 8.9 billion tonnes of virgin plastic (non-recycled) and secondary plastic (produced from recycled products) has been manufactured since the middle of the last century, when plastics began to be produced on an industrial scale. About two-thirds of this total — 6.3 billion tonnes — has been discarded as waste, while 2.6 billion tonnes is still in use, according to a study published in 2017 in Science Advances.

The increase in the production of virgin plastic is accelerating. In 2016, the manufacture of virgin plastic reached 396 million tonnes, says a report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) published in March this year. WWF’s projections indicate that if the increase in production is not contained, the world will have to deal with about 550 million tonnes of the material by 2030.

(SciDev.Net/wi)

Reference:
Carla I.A. Fuente, Andressa Tamyris de Souza, Carmen C. Tadini, Pedro Esteves Duarte Augusto: “Ozonation of cassava starch to produce biodegradable films”; International Journal of Biological Macromolecules, December 2019: doi.org/10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2019.09.028

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