UC San Diego

Plastic pollution is overrunning the planet. To combat this, it is important to be able to generate biodegradable alternative plastics and measure their biodegradability. The research aimed to develop a method for quantifying the biodegradation of these plastics using peroxide digestion with Fenton’s Reagent. The results show that peroxide digestion can be used in tandem with other analytical methods to quantify biodegradation, namely with mass loss, compression analysis, and supplemental FTIR spectroscopy.