Response of Society and Market

Abstract

Plastic polymers have benefited the human society and heavily contributed to our improved style of life from several viewpoints. Indeed, the easy processable, light and low-cost structural plastics and the possibility of combining in them functional and thermomechanical properties have allowed a rapid growth for easy and large-scale production with advanced performances in all fields from building and construction, electronics, packaging and transportation industries as well as to the activities addressed to the biomedical assistance for human health. No doubt that this trend will continue and will certainly be assisted and promoted by developing new strategies to produce plastics polymers from renewable sources when this is sustainable. The above helpful applications were first realized with polymer from fossil and mostly characterized by long durability, which is not always convenient. In the absence of rules and control about disposal, this has created problem to the environment. An approach to relief this problem comes from biodegradable plastics, which can be disposed in the environment and disappear in much shorter time than traditional plastics from fossil origin. Clearly, these products cannot be used for practically all the other uses. The biodegradability has also attracted the attention towards plastics from natural and then renewable sources thus helping to save oil and introduce more natural technology. As discussed in this chapter, the term bioplastic includes today a series of polymeric materials where a significant weight part derives from renewable sources, but the final properties are not necessarily different from the ones of the analogues from fossil sources. Rather, apart from the biodegradability necessary in some applications (agriculture, biomedical materials and some very short-term packaging) the objective is to reach comparative properties. In this framework, the modern idea of circular economy, which claims recycling to zero waste and the availability of raw materials in the necessary quantity, put forward additional concepts in evaluating the comparative use of plastic and bioplastics .