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Is there a plastic which can be decomposed by bacteria and other living organisms within the environment over a specific time interval which is also called biodegradable plastic?
Summary
This student experiment tested whether biodegradable plastics can truly be decomposed by bacteria and other organisms within a defined time period, contributing to public understanding of how "biodegradable" labeling may be misleading when degradation rates depend heavily on environmental conditions.
In this experiment I have investigated the research question: “Is there a plastic which can be decomposed by bacteria and other living organisms within the environment over a specific time interval which is also called biodegradable plastic?” This experiment was done in order to indicate if there was a plastic that could be dissolved faster and easier than other usual plastics like nylons under environmental conditions and which can also solve the global waste problem of plastics. From this experiment and the results of the experiment it was seen that biodegradable plastics were in existence and they would decompose more in a specific time interval than usual plastics would decompose. In the experiment, firstly nylon 6,10 and biodegradable plastic was synthesized and same amount of plastics were collected. Then these plastics were buried into the soil for 180 days and from this the decomposition rates of the biodegradable plastic and the nylon 6,10 used in the experiment was calculated for 180 days. Although the ASTM’s biodegradability method focused on the amount of the carbon that converted into the carbondioxide at the end of the 180 days, in this experiment the decomposition rates of the plastics were calculated and detected by the change in masses of the plastics over 180 days. But from the data obtained from this experiment, it was seen that there were a lot of systematic errors that caused by this mass change technique which showed that this technique was not appropriate to detect the decomposition rates of the biodegradable plastic and nylon 6,10 over 180 days.