In the last few decades, there has been a dramatic increase in industrial and urban activities, culminating in the need for people to adopt improved living conditions. This has led to an increase in the use of packaging materials, mainly in the form of plastic. Plastics have become an indispensable part of today’s world. Due to their lightweight, durability, energy efficiency, coupled with ease...

The main structural plant cell wall polymers cellulose, hemicelluloses, and lignin rank amongst the most abundant biopolymers in Earth’s carbon cycle. These three polymers form the lignocellulose complex and constitute the bulk of the cell wall with 40-50%, 10-40% and 5-30% of biomass by weight, respectively [1, 2]. Its highly ordered structure of cellulose microfibril aggregates, embedded in a...

In landfills, deposited waste material is usually faced with strictly anoxic conditions. This means that the design of new biodegradable polymers must take into consideration that degradation should be possible especially in the absence of molecular oxygen. Poly-beta-hydroxybutyrate is depolymerized by the anaerobic fermenting bacterium Ilyobacter delafieldii through an extracellular hydrolase....

Polyolefin, as one of the most widely used macromolecule materials, has been one of the most serious threats to the environment. Current treatment methods of waste polyolefin including landfill, incineration, and thermal degradation have suffered from severe problems such as secondary pollution and the generation of other toxic substances. In this article, we report for the first time a high-ef...

background: cattle can be considered as an important source for herbicides through nutrition. therefore, herbicide residue in animal products is a potential human exposure to herbicides causing public health problems in human life. triazines are a group of herbicides primarily used to control broadleaf weeds in corn and other feed ingredients and are considered as possible human carcinogens. to...

Electronic waste (e-waste) is one of the fastest increasing waste streams worldwide due to unprecedented growth of the electronics industry, rapid obsolescence and subsequent disposal of electronic devices. Printed circuit boards (PCBs), the central component of electronic devices, are highly complex. PCBs are an important resource of metals, and contain substantial amounts of copper, tin, lead...

Environmental remediation requires ion-selective polymers that operate under a wide range of solution conditions. In one example, removal of trivalent and divalent metal ions from waste streams resulting from mining operations before they enter the environment requires treatment at acidic pH. The monoethyl ester phosphate ligands developed in this report operate from acidic solutions. They have...

Nanocomposites have attracted a great deal of interest during recent years. Much research has been conducted towards the incorporation of clay particles in a polypropylene matrix. However, the effect of extrusion reprocessing on the material properties has not been studied in depth. In this study, composites of polypropylene (PP) reinforced with organic modified montmorillonite (MMT) (4 wt%) an...

Growing concerns regarding the impact of the accumulation of plastic waste over several decades on the environmental have led to the development of biodegradable plastic. These plastics can be degraded by microorganisms and absorbed by the environment and are therefore gaining public support as a possible alternative to petroleum-derived plastics. Among the developed biodegradable plastics, oxo...

The significant increase of Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) has led to an important research in upgrading recycled engineering plastics by means of a blending technique. Classical twin-screw extrusion is compared to a new blending technique, where two polymers are combined together and then flow in several static mixers. This technique allows to obtain different morphologies of c...