Tailoring Biodegradability of Poly(Butylene Succinate)/Poly(Lactic Acid) Blends With a Deep Eutectic Solvent

Abstract

Biodegradable polymers concern an important topic for innovation in materials, as they are supposed to contribute to the reduction in the amount of waste materials, which lead to microplastics with similar properties as conventional polymer materials. Poly(butylene succinate) and poly(lactic acid) blends are polymers with interesting properties offering possible alternatives to some conventional petrochemical-sourced polymers. Some of the physical properties of such blends can be tailored from the addition of small amounts of deep eutectic solvents (DESs) that can act as compatibilizers, i.e., interfacial agents between poly(butylene succinate) (PBS) and poly(lactic acid) (PLA). In our study, materials formulated with a DES having a coarse morphology according to the dispersed particle sizes display thermal and mechanical properties rather close to the non-compatibilized PBS/PLA blends but a higher ability to biodegrade. In comparison with PBS/PLA blend, biodegradation experiments show that PBS/PLA/DES blend exhibits higher weight losses and faster fragmentation under conventional conditions. A significant decrease in PLA melting temperature under composting conditions, i.e., at 58 • C, is observed indicating that PLA phase is the component mainly concerned. As a conclusion, this work demonstrates that morphologies as well as the biodegradability process can be tailored by adding a small amount of a DES in such biosourced polymer blends. Indeed, designing polymer materials, for which degradation processes are targeted in the dispersed phase, i.e., in multiple locations of the material, can be an efficient route to "predegrade" phases in a polymer matrix to accelerate macroscopic biodegradation.

Marine Environmental Plastic Pollution: Mitigation by Microorganism Degradation and Recycling Valorization

“…Polylactic acid (PLA) is synthetically polymerized aliphatic polyester that can be decomposed to lactic acid by the cleavage of ester bonds (Figure 10D). These polymers are industrially biodegradable and can undergo chemical degradation (hydrolytic under high temperature and humidity), being easily susceptible to biological degradation (Cho et al, 2000;Delamarche et al, 2020). However, this limits their durability and long-term performance (Muthuraj et al, 2015).…”

“…In addition, the hydrolysis of PLA is highly dependent on the temperature and pH of the media. Thus, the hydrolysis process is strongly accelerated under alkaline conditions and high temperatures (55-60 • C) (Schliecker et al, 2003;Su et al, 2019;Delamarche et al, 2020).…”

Rheological Percolation of Cellulose Nanocrystals in Biodegradable Poly(butylene succinate) Nanocomposites: A Novel Approach for Tailoring the Mechanical and Hydrolytic Properties

“…The hydrolysis of PBS-CNC nanocomposites was conducted in a chemical medium consisting of NaOH (0.1 N). 29,30 As shown in Figure 3, the neat PBS and PBS-CNC nanocomposite specimens undergo weight loss of less than 5% (0.118 to 0.117 g for the neat PBS and 0.132 to 0.129 g for CNC0.6) upon chemical degradation for 6 days in the CNC loading from 0.0-0.6 wt%, whereas the weight loss of the nanocomposites becomes significant above 0.8 wt%. The weight loss for CNC1.0 and CNC1.5 was about 15% (0.149 to 0.127 g after 6 days) and 25% (0.148 to 0.112 g after 5 days), respectively.…”

Investigating the Effect of Aluminum Diethylphosphinate on Thermal Stability, Flame Retardancy, and Mechanical Properties of Poly(butylene succinate)

“…In the last decade, biodegradable polymers have drawn particular attention due to their advantages of biodegradability, good mechanical properties, easy processing, and chemical resistance (Chen et al, 2017;Chen Y. et al, 2019;Delamarche et al, 2020;He W. et al, 2020;Li et al, 2018;Xiong et al, 2019;Xu et al, 2019;Yang et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2021;Zhang et al, 2020). As a typical representative, poly(butylene succinate) (PBS) has wide applications in the fields of biomedical materials, transport, construction, electrical industry, and packing materials (Bahrami et al, 2021;Hu et al, 2019;Li et al, 2020;Xue et al, 2019;Zhao et al, 2020).…”