♻️🛠️ Self-healing plastic becomes biodegradable 🔁🌿
Imagine a plastic like this: harder than common plastics, non-flammable, and even with self-healing properties. But that is not all! It can be produced at room temperature in water, which is very energy-efficient and does not require toxic solvents. Before hardening, you can shape the plastic in any way you want -- like chewing gum. By adding water, it can also be converted back to its"chewing gum" form at any time, reshaped and thus recycled as often as desired.
Is that impossible? No, it is not! In 2016, the research team around Konstanz chemist Helmut Cölfen presented just such a material -- a mineral plastic. However, even though the plastic, with its novel manufacturing process and outstanding material properties, has since attracted great interest from industry, it still had a crucial shortcoming from the Konstanz chemists' point of view: due to its chemical composition, it was difficult to biodegrade.
"Our new mineral plastic has the same positive properties as the previous one, but has the decisive advantage that its basic building block -- polyglutamic acid -- can be produced with the help of microorganisms and is completely biodegradable," says Helmut Cölfen.
In degradation experiments, the biologists were able to show that microorganisms found in forest soils, for example, began metabolizing the mineral plastic after just a few days. After only 32 days, the microorganisms had completely degraded the plastic. So the researchers have actually succeeded in making the mineral plastic with all its positive material properties now also sustainable and biodegradable.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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