That handy styrofoam cup you toss and forget once the last sip of scalding coffee is downed, will survive as long as forever. It’s quite obvious India doesn’t know how to handle its ocean of plastic, but scientists in Pune are taking a lethal swipe at this growing byproduct of success — with a magic pellet: sugar.The National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) at Pune, during low-budget exploratory lab time, has found an eco-friendly non-toxic way to bio-degrade high volume, commonly used plastics like shopping bags, disposable cups and packaging material. The answer has been in our kitchens all along and the NCL scientists have applied for a US patent to protect the idea.‘‘It’s very exciting,’’ Dr Anjani J. Varma, deputy director-level scientist at the polymer science and engineering group of NCL’s chemical engineering division, told The Indian Express. ‘‘I have been answering calls from all over Europe and America. We will scale up the project and cover it with as many patents as possible for every modification in the method.’’ With the world producing 150m tonnes of plastic every year a team from NCL’s polymer and biochemistry divisions decided to see if they could speed up plastic decay from decades to months.So how do they do it? Turns out that soil bacteria adore sucrose, glucose and lactose from the sugar family. The polymer chain (plastic) is made chemically functional for sweet bonding with sugar. Then sugar molecules — less than three pc, mostly just one pc — are chemically and randomly hooked to this functional polymer chain. They can’t fall off. When greedy soil bacteria munch on the sugary delicacy, they break down the polymer chain and hasten bio-degradation.‘‘With 3 pc sugar attached, we expected weight loss of the same amount. But we recorded 10-20 pc weight loss with bio-degradation. That was unexpected, and we published the results,’’ said Varma.The team has identified plastics for the sweet breakdown: polyethylene, polystyrene and polypropylene. Research will continue for two more years, but applicability depends on how the industry incorporates changes in production methods. An NCL report announcing the finding states: ‘‘A small percentage of sugar incorporated in the chain dramatically increases the rate of polymer degradation. Other properties of the polymer remain unchanged.’’ The paper was published in Chemical Communication last November and Nature-Science updates picked it up.Dr Digambar Gokhale from NCL’s biochemical division said: ‘‘It is exciting as a low amount of sugar integrated in polymer leads to faster degradation of plastic. But these are preliminary results. We have to find out if it bio-degrades into CO2, how fast and how quickly.’’ So far, most attempts at breaking down plastic are based on toxic additives that can leach out and may damage some qualities of the polymer. ‘‘The idea started two years ago as an exploratory research. We had to decide which sugars bacteria love to attack, then how to chemically, not physically, hook sugar molecules onto polymers,’’ said Varma.So far, so sweet.
