Q: Can that plastic spoon really return to nature? On the face of it, biodegradable plastic is a miracle. It looks like plastic and works much like plastic.

On Earth Day 2025, Arkansas researchers are calling attention to the growing plastic pollution crisis and urging a multi-tiered approach to reduce the environmental and health risks tied to single ...

Danimer Scientific, the firm responsible for those applications, puts the addressable PHA market at 230 million metric tons (t) per year—more than half the world’s plastic demand.

Biodegradable vs. degradable. Degradable plastic bags have a lot of chemicals and heavy metals in them. This can cause problems when the plastic starts to break down because the chemical and ...

But both recycling and biopolymers face obstacles. Despite years of effort, the plastics recycling rate in the US, for instance, is still less than 10%.

As expected for a non-biodegradable material, EVA microparticles showed no CO 2 evolution over the 200-day experiment. TPU-FC1 microplastics displayed significant biodegradation, reaching 76% CO 2 ...

Biodegradable plastics that get broken down into microplastics appear to damage soil and affect plant growth more than conventional ones, at least over the short term. Global plastic production ...

Biodegradable plastics still damaging to fish Date: October 19, 2023 Source: University of Otago Summary: Biodegradable plastics may not be the solution to plastic pollution many hoped for, with a ...

However, traditional plastics are typically made from fossil fuels, and therefore contribute to the ongoing climate crisis. According to a UN Environment Program (UNEP) report, fossil fuel-based ...

UC Berkeley photo by Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering Some single-use plastics have been replaced with biodegradable options in recent years, but even those aren’t fully compostable.

Lucky spectators at the 2022 Freret or Tucks parades could catch one of the rarest Carnival throws ever. At long last, biodegradable beads, containing plastic made from algae in an LSU laboratory ...