Biopolymers: An Alternative to Conventional Plastic

Plastic has long been an important role in our daily life as it is light, inexpensive and versatile material. The foods that we buy from markets are supplied in plastic bags, plastic films and other kinds of plastic containers. But all of we know continuous usage of conventional plastic cause waste accumulation and greenhouse gases emission. And their persistence in environment causes high cost of solid waste disposal as well as the potential hazards from waste incineration such as dioxin emission from PVC resulted waste management problem. Annually 300 million tons of plastic are produced worldwide. Among that more than 50% of the plastic is single use plastic that can be used once and thrown away. To solve the current problem of pollution due to continuous usage of plastic biopolymers i.e. the polymers which are produced naturally by using living organisms such as bacteria, algae have been developed. The polymers produced by this method are biocompatible and biodegradable. Their properties are almost comparable with the conventional plastics. Now, various microorganisms are known that produced biopolymer like PHA (Polyhydroxyalkanoates) naturally