Enhancement of biodegradability and tensile characteristics of composite plastic film with spirulina algal biomass

Abstract

This paper presents the possibility of blending the Spirulina Algae with Poly-Vinyl Alcohol (PVA) in producing composite plastic film with higher biodegradability. In this paper, the tensile characteristics and biodegradation rate of the plastic films with different blending ratio of algae with PVA was investigated. By using solvent casting technique, the composite films with 0%, 5%, 10% and 20% (wt/wt) of algae/PVA were fabricated. The soil degradation results show that the degradation increased as the algal percentage increased. The composite plastic film gave up to ∼50% of weight loss after 1 week of degradation process. Besides, by comparing with other study, the soil degradation results of this study suggested that Spirulina Algae can be act as a better blender with PVA in producing plastic film as compared to corn starch. Moreover, the plastic film demonstrated an excellent tensile characteristic with the increment of algal proportional. The ultimate tensile strength, however, remained constant at around 165 MPa for 10% and 20% algae/PVA plastic films, which was higher than the other previous study. With this high ultimate tensile strength, it was suggested that the algae/PVA composite film are more applicable towards heavy-duty plastics manufacturing sectors that requires tough and durable plastic films. In short, the optimal proportion of Spirulina Algae to PVA for the production of composite plastic film is 20 (wt/wt)% as it gave high ultimate tensile strength and at the same time has the highest biodegradability.