Designing for degradation: the importance of considering biotic and abiotic polymer degradation
Name
d5em00079c.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.47 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
b91da61b401aebb4040d8bf95c919d1f
Author(s)
Tantawi, Omar
Joo, Wontae
Martin, Elijah E
Av-Ron, Sarah HM
Bannister, K'yal R
Prather, Kristala LJ
Olsen, Bradley D
Plata, Desiree L
Date Issued
April 10, 2025
Journal
Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts
Publisher
Royal Society of Chemistry
Citation
Tantawi, Omar, Joo, Wontae, Martin, Elijah E, Av-Ron, Sarah HM, Bannister, K'yal R et al. 2025. "Designing for degradation: the importance of considering biotic and abiotic polymer degradation." Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts, 27 (5).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Considering the increasing global plastic demand, there is a critical need to gain insight into environmental processes that govern plastic degradation in order to inform novel design of sustainable polymers. Current biological degradation testing standards focus on formation of CO2 (i.e., mineralization) alone as a diagnostic, ultimately limiting identification of structure–degradation relationships in a timely fashion. This work developed a sequential abiotic (i.e., photodegradation and hydrolysis) and biotic degradation test and applied it to a suite of 18 polymers, including ten lab produced, novel polyhydroxyalkanoate polyesters, and eight commercially available, bio-based (i.e., polylactic acid and poly-3-hydroxybutyrate) and fossil-derived (i.e., polystyrene, polypropylene, low density polyethylene, poly(ethylene terephthalate) and tire rubber) polymers. Biomineralization alone following standard methods (i.e., ASTM 6691-17, ISO 23977-1 2020) underestimated polymer degradation up to two-fold over 28 days. Simulated sunlight enhanced the overall polymer degradation by mobilizing dissolved organic carbon (DOC). After photoirradiation, up to 100% of released dissolved organic carbon was bioavailable for marine microbes over 14 days. Photodegradation and hydrolysis could be explained by structural drivers in the commodity polymers, and the lab-synthesized polymers illustrated a limit to total degradation beyond which no enhancements in degradation were achieved. Taken together, this workflow allows for relatively fast experimental determination of environmentally relevant stimuli to help support eventual elucidation of structure–property relationships for enhanced a priori design of degradable polymers.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1039/d5em00079c
