Environmental issues biodegradation tests

Because of the central role that estimates of biodegradability play in environmental impact assessments, a great deal of effort has been devoted to developing standardized test procedures (Gerike and Fischer 1981). In spite of this, conventional tests for biodegradability under aerobic conditions retain some questionable, or even undesirable, features from an environmental point of view. Attention is therefore drawn to two valuable critiques of widely used procedures (Howard and Banerjee 1984 Battersby 1990). Some of the important issues in the design of such tests are therefore only briefly summarized here. 

Albertsson, A. C. and Karlsson, S. (1990) Biodegradation and test methods for environmental and biomedical applications of polymers, in Degradable Materials Perspectives, Issues and Opportunities (eds. S. A. Barenberg, J. L. Brash, R. Narayan and A. E. Redpath), CRC Press, Boca Raton, pp. 263-86. 

Note, these definitions do not quantify the extent of degradation by any of the pathways they only indicate of the mechanism that is operating to promote degradation. While this is acceptable in a scientific sense to define a process or mechanism, the definitions do not meet or satisfy the requirement for environmentally acceptable degradable and biodegradable polymers, which, in the minds of legislators and lay people, is the key issue. To satisfy this very practical requirement, specifications for acceptability have to be set and monitored by standard testing protocols, based on the above definitions, which will be discussed later. 

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