Millions of tons of plastic packaging and other plastic waste are hauled to over-flowing landfills every year around the world and will remain there for a very long time.  The plastics industry is continuously searching for solutions to this problem by implementing “green” technologies, including the development of biodegrad-able plastics.

Knovel recently helped one engineer who was looking into utilizing soybeans in the manufacture of biodegradable plastics.

The idea came after a very simple search on Knovel for ’soybean oil and plastics’. The search produced 34 titles with a wealth of information on the use of soybean oil in the plastics and coatings industry. Click the image below to see the results.

In Modern Plastics Handbook, the engineer found that biodegradable polylactic acid (PLA) can be modified with epoxidized soybean oil to increase melt elasticity and also learned that epoxidized soybean oil can be used as a media to introduce a bactericide into a plastic.

The engineer found that soybean oil not only serves as a good biodegradable alternative to standard plastics and can increase the processing properties of PLA, but it can also help to fight microbes in the products made from it!