why does plastic deteriorate into microplastic. Why cant we break microplastic into just carbon chains?
In: Chemistry
Plastic deteriorates into microplastics due to environmental factors like sunlight, heat, and mechanical wear. Breaking microplastics into basic carbon chains is challenging because of the complex chemical structures in plastics, which involve various additives and polymers. Complete and efficient breakdown into simple carbon chains requires specialized processes and technologies, and natural degradation is often limited.
That’s basically what plastic is. Most plastics are made of long hydrocarbon chains, sometimes with some other atom like oxygen or chlorine thrown in. There is research into getting bacteria to break down plastic and some have shown the ability to break down certain plastics.
But history has shown you want to be cautious with this sort of thing.
Plastic deterioates into microplastics because of natural processes. Heat, sunlight, and other environmental stresses break down these plastics over time, just like other materials.
They get to the point where they are broken down to the point where natural circumstances can no longer significantly break them down anymore. This is microplastics.
You can break down microplastics into carbon chains but this is not an easy process. Those carbon chains you mentioned have very strong bonds and intermolecular forces, hence why plastic is used so often, it’s strong. You can break them down with special equipment that requires a lot of energy but it’s time consuming and not worth the effort if it isn’t on a mass scale.
Plastics are also usually contaminated so you can’t simply just break them down into “just carbon chains”.
Here’s my take on n the idea of why can’t we just break them down. The way you make different kinds of plastics is very much like weaving. There are very specific processes to create very specific plastics. In that sense, you could theoretically set up a very effective process to “unweave” the plastic back to its component elements.
Couple of challenges, though. There are a *lot* of different kinds of plastics out there. I mean, a **lot**. Different kinds will need different processes to unweave them. Even if there’s a lot of overlap, that will add an incredible amount of mechanical and chemical complexity.
Challenge the second: all those different plastics in the trash are mixed together. Before you can start to break them down, you have to get them sorted. That ends up being a logistical nightmare too.
So yeah, it’s messy.
Most structural materials in nature (lignin, cellulose, etc) have natural, biological methods to decompose them into their original building blocks to be repurposed for other processes within the cell/organism. Plastic is so new, evolutionarily, that essentially nothing breaks it down in nature. It doesn’t decompose like natural materials, it weathers down from physical processes into pieces so small they’re effectively impossible to filter out. That’s microplastics.
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