Recent insight into enzymatic degradation of plastics prevalent in the environment: A mini - review

Abstract

Plastic pollution has been prevalent in the world ever since its use in majority of the areas including packaging, electronic industries, building and construction, healthcare, transportation etcetera. This has lead to a constantly increasing burden on the environment which has attracted many environmentalists and scientists towards working on different ways to cope up with this threat. Many studies have been done to find out ways to naturally degrade plastics using hidden capabilities of microbes that can use these plastics as their sole carbon source. Enzymatic degradation of plastics has been thought of serving this purpose since the revelation of microbial enzymes that can act on plastic in their natural environment and because of it being a much quicker and efficient way as compared to others. This paper gives a brief review on the degradation of plastics using enzymes from various sources and future prospects related to this area of research.

Keywords

• Biodegradation
• Enzymatic degradation
• Mineralisation
• Hydrolytic cleavage