10/08/2020

As mentioned in earlier posts, most plastic waste ends up either in landfill or in our waterways. It is important to ‘make visible’ that our marine algal based bioplastics and biopolymers are biodegradable. If they return to the sea, our desire is that they do not add to the plastic waste problem.

Together with CMBD staff member Peng Su and visiting scholar Wanling Cai, I went on a field trip to collect water samples from the South Australian coastline. A variety of locations were selected to include various waters; brackish, mangrove, shallow beach and open sea. We travelled over 400km as all samples were collected on the same day.  The waters will be used to test/prove the biodegradability of seaweed derived plastic polymers.