The effect of natural rubber on the biodegradability of PHBV
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Date
2018-12
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Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
Biodegradable plastics can break down into water, carbon dioxide, and/or methanol by microorganisms, offering several advantages over conventional plastic, such as waste reduction, source reduction, and energy saving. PHBV and natural rubber are individually biodegradable, but the rubber-PHBV blends have never been studied to assess this property. It is hypothesized that the addition of rubber retains PHBV biodegradability. Therefore, the biodegradability of PHBV/rubber blends was studied in an aerobic composting system at 58 ℃. The result has shown that the pure PHBV has much higher degree of biodegradability than that of the rubber-PHBV blend. The addition of the natural rubber did improve the elasticity of the PHBV, but it weakened the feature of the biodegradability of the PHBV. In the future, a better weight fraction of the natural rubber in the blend is need to be found.
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Keywords
biodegradability, PHBV, PHBV-Rubber blend