Abstract

An extensive effort was made by many industries to shrink the usage of petroleum-based product or synthetic fiber owing to raising consciousness in the environmental issues. Realizing this phenomenon, research works on biodegradable polymers from natural fibers and production of eco-friendly products are geared towards replacing the existing petroleum-based products. One of the promising polymers is polylactic acid (PLA) and it has good mechanical and thermal properties like other thermoplastic such as polyolefin. The uniqueness of the current research is that PLA was synthesized in house through polymerization of lactic acid (LA) obtained from a simple fermentation product of kenaf biomass (KB). KB was introduced as the raw material in chemical pretreatment process to liberate glucose which was then used as the carbon sources in microbial fermentation via Lactobacillus rhamnosus to produce lactic acid. Lactic acid produced was purified before being polymerized via ring opening polymerization (ROP) method. The PLA obtained was characterized and analyzed using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), gel permeation chromatography (GPC), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA).

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