Biodegradable polymers

Alongside their enormous range of useful applications, polymers are also blamed for a real environmental cost: most synthetic plastics resist attack by soil microbes and persist in the environment for a very long time, causing serious pollution, in sharp contrast to disposed natural wastes (stale food, fruit peels, torn cotton cloth), which soil microbes readily break down into humus. To strike a better balance between usefulness and environmental impact, chemists have developed new classes of biodegradable synthetic polymers, engineered to carry functional groups similar to those found in natural biopolymers such as proteins. Aliphatic polyesters and polyamides carrying a large proportion of polar linkages form one especially important class of such …