The degradation environment

Between the above extremes are polymers which are required to biodegrade in a controlled aerobic compost. This is quite a different environment from sanitary landfill. Until quite recently, a major concern of environmentalists, particularly in the USA, was that plastics, unlike paper, did not biodegrade in landfill [9]. This has since been shown to be a misapprehension since neither paper nor biodegradable plastics will biodegrade in a properly prepared landfill. Furthermore, it is now considered important that waste products should not biodegrade in anaerobic landfill due to the subsidence that subsequently occurs with methane evolution and associated explosion hazard. 

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The degradation environment is critically uhportant to the design of biodegradable polymers. Many waste polymers end up in sewage systems where there is an abundance of microorganisms and rapid hy-... 

Fig. 42 Dependency of CL emission intensity of the concentration of oxygen in the degradation environment. The data were taken from [06V1].

Step 4 Determination of ecotoxic effects using bioassays compatible with the degradation environment, e.g., 3 plant species for soil applications, or daphnia and... 

Gas chromatography (GC) and liquid chromatography (LC) together with mass spectroscopy (MS) are the methods most suitable to detect low molecular weight compounds. Often it is necessary to develop special extraction procedures when analysing polymers. The materials are very complex and the degradation environment complicates the analyses even further. 

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