MICROPLASTICS 
THE “PLASTIC” TOUCH. 
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Rubika shree 

 
  

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TABLE OF CONTENT 
 

I.Introduction 

II. Background and Significance 

III. Literature Review 

IV. contemporary development 

IV.1 ​catalyzed pyrolysis 

IV.2​ ​bacterial degradation 

IV.3 waste plastic to diesel 

V. Citations 
 
 
 

 
  

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I. Introduction 
 
Look around, you're probably breathing the air with tiny bits of plastics floating around, take a 
sip of some water from the faucet, there are again plastics hanging around in them, out of our 
sight, invisible. Now take a look at the food chain, plastic has found its way at the top of the 
food chain, pretty scary. it has indeed pervaded every inch of our lives. certainly, it has caused 
us a lot of trouble right from cancers to toxication and death of many living organisms. You 
probably would have heard about King Midas and the golden touch, in the same way, we were 
granted the wish of having a very versatile substance to be included in our daily uses called 
‘plastic’.As anticipated, we got it into use more than what we were supposed to, and everything 
which gives us comfort has its own consequences.Wood, grass and food scraps undergo a 
process known as biodegradation when they're buried, which is a fancy way of saying they're 
transformed by bacteria in the soil into other useful compounds. But bacteria turn up their 
noses at plastic. Load their dinner plates with some plastic bags and bottles, and the one-celled 
gluttons will skip the meal entirely. 

Earth’s oceans are full of plastics debris. Researchers found that 4.8 to 12.7 ​million tonnes ​of 
plastics entered the oceans in 2010. Plastics are transboundary pollutants. Plastics products are 
not biodegradable but under stress, say heat or sunlight, they keep disintegrating over time into 
smaller and smaller particles. They can reach a size x5mm, becoming microplastics. They keep 
breaking up, even becoming nanoparticles. In a marine environment, the physical forces that 
cause such disintegration are winds, waves and ultraviolet radiation (from sunlight). In all this, 
the chemicals used to make them persist, even in microparticle and nanoparticle forms. Also, 
these particles, because of their chemical content, attract persistent organic pollutants 
(pesticide residue, for example). Since such residues exist in the ocean, a plastic product, 
breaking up, becomes even more toxic. 

This research is all about polymer. Simply polymers are everywhere. Polymer, any of a class of 
natural or synthetic substances composed of very large molecules, called macromolecules, that 
are multiples of simpler chemical units called monomers. Polymers make up many of the 
materials in living organisms, including, for example, proteins, cellulose, and nucleic acids. 
Moreover, they constitute the basis of such minerals as diamond, quartz, and feldspar and such 
man-made materials as concrete, glass, paper, plastics, and rubbers. 

The main purpose of our research is to improve the way we do environmental risk assessment 
for microplastics. For instance, there are changes in the behavior and toxic response patterns of 
aquatic life exposed to microplastic that we are only beginning to understand. We aim to not 
  

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only understand this better, but also how these responses change over time, as microplastics 
weather. We also aim to create more public awareness concerning this grave issue, so that the 
public, legislators, and industry can better confront the impacts of plastic pollution in our 
oceans. 

 
II. Background and Significance 
 
Let's see the story of three plastic bottles, empty and discarded. Their journeys are about to 
diverge with outcomes that impact nothing less than the fate of the planet. bottle one, like 
hundreds of millions of tons of his plastic brethren, ends up in a landfill. This huge dump 
expands each day! As plastic sits there being compressed amongst layers of other junk, 
rainwater flows through the waste and absorbs the water-soluble compounds it contains, and 
some of those are highly toxic. together they create a harmful stew called leachate, which can 
move into groundwater soil and streams, poisoning ecosystem and harming wildlife. It can take 
bottle one an agonizing 1,000 years to decompose.  

Bottle two’s journey is strange but, unfortunately, no happier. He floats on a trickle that reaches 
a stream, a stream that flows into a river, and a river that reaches the ocean. after months lost 
in the sea, he is slowly drawn into a massive vortex where trash accumulates. It reaches a place 
known as the great pacific garbage patch. Here the ocean currents have trapped millions of 
pieces of plastic debris. This one is one of the five plastic-filled gyres in the world's sea. Places 
where the pollutants turn the water into cloudy plastic soup. Some animals like seabirds, get 
entangled in the mess. They and the others mistake these floating colorful plastic for food! 
Plastic makes them full when they are not, so they starve to death, and pass the toxins from 
plastic up the food chain. For example, tiny bits of plastics are eaten by lantern fish, the lantern 
fish are eaten by squid, squids are eaten by tuna and guess what, tuna are eaten by us [humans]! 
We have become the prey to our self-created monster!microplastics might rotate in the sea 
eternally. 

But bottle three is spared the cruel purgatories of his brothers. A truck brings him to a plant 
where he and his companions are squeezed flat and compressed into a block. Okay, this sounds 
pretty bad too, but hang in there, It gets better. The blocks are shredded into tiny pieces, which 
are washed and melted, so they become the raw materials that can be used again. As if by magic 
bottle three is now ready to be reborn as something completely new! Although recycling is a 
very good idea for controlling plastic pollution, Only 17% of the whole plastics being produced 
is recycled rest have the same fate as bottle one and two. 
  

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This is because the density of plastic is either similar to each other or have almost the same 
densities which make the separation process more difficult. If we compare the density ranges of 
metals to plastics, different metals have very different densities and different colors. This 
spares the difficult jobs of separation for metals, whereas plastics have a totally opposite 
situation. Neither could densities help us separate nor can we identify different types of plastics 
on the basis of colors as all kinds of plastics come in different colors and they don't have a 
particular color for a particular type of plastic. 

III. Literature Review 

A crucial manufacturing step turns petroleum into a 

material unrecognized by the organisms that 
normally break organic matter down. 
Most plastics are derived from propylene, a simple 
chemical component of petroleum. When heated up 
in the presence of a catalyst, individual chemical 
units [monomers of propylene] link together by forming extremely strong carbon-carbon bonds 
with each other. This results in polymers long chains of monomers called polypropylene. Nature 
doesn't make things like that, so organisms have never seen that before. The organisms that 
  

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decompose organic matter the ones that start turning your apple brown the instant you cut it 
open have evolved over billions of years to attack certain types of bonds that are common in 
nature, For example, they can very quickly break down polysaccharides to get sugar. They can 
chew up wood. But they see a polypropylene with all its carbon-carbon bonds, and they don't 
normally break something like that down so there aren't metabolic pathways to do it. But if all 
you have to do to make propylene subunits turn into polypropylene is heat them up, why 
doesn't nature ever build polypropylene molecules? 

According to Peters, it's because the carbon-carbon bonds in polypropylene require too much 
energy to make, so nature chooses other alternatives for holding together large molecules. "It's 
easier for organisms to synthesize peptide bonds than carbon-carbon bonds," he said. Peptide 
bonds, which link carbon to nitrogen, are found in proteins and many other organic molecules. 
Environmentalists might wonder why plastic manufacturers don't use peptide bonds to build 
polymers rather than carbon-carbon bonds so that they'll biodegrade rather than lasting forever 
in a landfill. Unfortunately, while peptide bonds would produce plastics that biodegrade, they 
would also have a very short shelf life. It's an issue of 'you can't have your cake and eat it too,' 
When you buy a plastic jar of mayonnaise, you want the jar to last a few months. You don't want 
it to start decomposing before you've finished the mayo inside. some disposable plastic 
products which don't need a very long shelf life are synthesized with peptide bonds in their 
chemical composition. But a carbon-carbon linkage will be more stable, so it depends on what 
people are trying to make. 

IV. contemporary development 

 

So far I have learned four ways we can decompose plastics. [but I haven't yet tested them in a 
lab]: 
IV.1 One is that we can decompose plastics in a chemical way something like a catalysed 
pyrolysis of plastics[ mostly polypropylene] rapidly with the help of a thermogravimetric 
analyzer. It basically is that degrading a substance in the presence of a catalyst[ a substance 
that can decrease the activation energy of a reaction and the time of reaction]. 
Thermogravimetric Analysis is a technique in which the mass of a substance is monitored as a 
function of temperature or time as the sample specimen is subjected to a controlled 
temperature program in a controlled atmosphere. An Alternate Definition: TGA is a technique 
in which, upon heating a material, its weight increases or decreases.TGA measures a sample’s 
weight as it is heated or cooled in a furnace. 
  

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IV.2 And the other idea is that we can degrade plastics biologically. If plastics take up an 
agonizing number of years to decompose in a natural way, there must be some sort of bacteria 
which must be the reason behind this phenomenon. Burd's hypothesis was that if plastic bags 
do eventually break down, it should be possible to isolate and concentrate the micro-organism 
responsible for the decomposition, thus speeding up the process. (Hey, at between one-half and 
90 percent of Earth's biomass, bacteria's a pretty safe bet for any biological mystery) If we find 
out the organism responsible for this process we can grow more of them and increase the rate of 
decomposition. 

According to 16-year-old science fair contestant, Daniel Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and 
tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more 
quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and 
configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus 
Pseudomonas​, and the other from the genus ​Sphingomonas​. Burd says this should be easy on an 
industrial scale: all that's needed is a fermenter, a growth medium, and waste plastic, and the 
bacteria themselves provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. 
The only waste is water and a bit of carbon dioxide.It goes without saying that these discoveries 
need to be tested to ensure, for instance, that the byproducts of organic decomposition are not 
carcinogenic (as in the case with the mammalian metabolism of styrene and benzene). The 
processing of plastics by these methods would also have to be contained in highly controlled 
environments. So, no, we're not talking about a magic panacea or a plastic-free paradise, but 
the innovative application of microorganisms to break down our most troublesome waste 
products is nevertheless a major scientific breakthrough. 

Thanks to Daniel Burd, he has successfully put a great piece on this jigsaw of the plastic waste 
management, but this not done. About 8 million metric tons of plastic are thrown into the 
ocean annually. Of those, 236,000 tons are microplastics – tiny pieces of broken-down plastic 
smaller than your little fingernail. There are five massive patches of plastic in the oceans 
around the world. These huge concentrations of plastic debris cover large swaths of the ocean; 
the one between California and Hawaii is the size of the state of Texas. Every minute, one 
garbage truck of plastic is dumped into our oceans. The amount of plastic in the ocean is set to 
increase tenfold by 2020. By 2050 there will be more plastic in the oceans than there are fish (by 
weight). Plastic is found in the ocean as far as 11km deep, meaning synthetic fibers have 
contaminated even the most remote places on Earth. Many marine organisms can’t distinguish 
common plastic items from food. Animals who eat plastic often starve because they can’t digest 
the plastic and it fills their stomachs, preventing them from eating real food. The likelihood of 
coral becoming diseased increases from 4% to 89% after coming in contact with marine plastic. 
  

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It also damages the skin of coral, allowing infection. Coral reefs are home to more than 25% of 
marine life. There is more plastic than natural prey at the sea surface of the Great Pacific 
Garbage Patch, which means that organisms feeding in this area are likely to have plastic as a 
major component of their diets. For instance, sea turtles by-caught in fisheries operating within 
and around the patch can have up to 74% (by dry weight) of their diets composed of ocean 
plastics. Many fish humans consume, including brown trout, cisco, and perch, have at one time 
or another, ingested plastic microfibers. 

 
IV​.​3 We can convert a polymer into its monomer, which could then be used as the building 
blocks to recreate the polymer. Unfortunately, the majority of plastics do not degrade readily 
into their monomer units,says Tina Gornall. Thermal degradation of polymers usually follows a 
radical mechanism (which is of high energy and requires high temperatures) and produces a 
largeproportion of straight chain alkanes, which have low relative octane number (RON-it 
determines the quality of the fuel) and so cannot be used in internal combustion engines. 
However, a suitable catalyst can help to branch straight alkane chains and so give high RON 
fuels that can be blended into commercial fuels. 
 

An extensive thermogravimetric study of polymer-catalyst mixtures was undertaken and 

produced dramatic reductions in the onset temperature of degradation and significant 
changes in the activation energy, suggesting a change to a desirable Brønsted- or Lewis acid 
catalysed degradation mechanism in many cases. For example, GC-MS analysis of 
low-density polyethylene (LDPE) degraded with Fulcat 435 clay showed the polymer 
forming a large number of C6-C7 single-branched alkanes of intermediate RON value. 
In comparison, the degradation of LDPE in the presence of a ZSM-5 zeolite (280z) resulted 
in the production of a large aromatic content together with branched C6-C8 hydrocarbons 
(40%). This formation of a large proportion of high RON components from polyethylene and 
other polymers could move us one step closer to tackling the enormous problem of plastic waste 
disposal that the world faces today. 
  

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IV.4 This is another way of converting waste plastics into dibasic acids which can then be used 
to produce other useful substances in very less time. 

CONCLUSION 

Although these great discoveries of people have a really big impact in the real world, they might 
have some side effects. Let us take daniel’s idea of biologically degrading plastics, this still 
needs the waste plastics to be sorted out before processing. There can be any unfavorable 
reactions due to the contaminated substrate of plastics.In Ms.Tina Gornall’s idea is a 
sustainable way of tackling this problem, yet is 
expensive.*********************************************************************************
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I still need to study more about catalysts and the isolation of bacterias that can potentially 
degrade plastics. I am in need of a lab and a guide to teach me more about polymers and their 
degradation processes. Please let me know if there are labs or institutions that can provide 
resources for my research. As this is my first ever experience of writing a research proposal, 
  

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please feel free to acquaint me. 

  

Contact me: 

Rubika shree 

Phone no. :8587069128 

Email ID: ​rubika.rs3610@gmail.com 

Thank you so much for taking out your invaluable time to read through my research proposal! 
 

V. Citations 
 
Fact Sheet: Plastics in the Ocean | Earth Day Network  
A Beginners Guide Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA)  
Microsoft Word - dburd2008-Plastic Not Fantastic  
What is Virgin Plastic? Is it recyclable? - Quora  
(PDF) Use of Plastic Waste in Bituminous Pavement 
​Processing of Waste Plastics into Building Materials Using a Plastic Extruder and Compression 
Testing of Plastic Bricks  
PET Washing Line, PET Bottle Recycling Machine, PET Bottle Washing Plant - YouTube  
making bricks out of waste ruber and plastics - Google Search  
(1) Catalysts (video) | Kinetics | Khan Academy  
Catalysis by Polymers - E. A. Bekturov, S. E. Kudaibergenov - Google Books  
catalysts in polymers - Google Search  
Tailor-Made Polymers: Via Immobilization of Alpha-Olefin Polymerization ... - Google Books  
How are polymers made? - Scientific American  
Study of the polymer–catalyst contact effectivity and the heating rate influence on the HDPE 
pyrolysis - ScienceDirect  
What is Octane number? definition and meaning - BusinessDictionary.com 
​BBC - Plastics Watch, How do you feed 400 people without using plastic?