Biodegradation

Plastic is a synthetic polymer which finds its use in our everyday life and its production continuous to increase every year due to the massive production and use of different plastic products. It has become a major pollutant of environment. Many traditional methods like UV photo oxidation, Thermal oxidation, Insulation and Land fill which were being practiced earlier are not feasible because they are not environment friendly and costlier. That is why alternative solution for the problem is biodegradation. Microorganism such as bacteria fungi and algae are capable of polythene degradation in its natural habitat. Much of work on biodegradation of plastic has been carried out using bacteria and fungi but very scanty literature is available in this field by using microalgae. That has present prompted us to collect dumped plastic waste from the water bodies of Kota, isolate and identify the microalgae growing on them and to access their biodegrading ability.

Issue of polythene pollution has evolved to become a major threat to global ecology because of polythene has strong resistance against degradation thus they remain in nature for very long time. A thinkable method to overcome this problem is bio-degradation by saprophytic fungi. Fungi from polythene decaying sites can initiate the de-polymerization of many polymers. In present study 10 saprophytic fungal isolates were grow on polythene by submerge fermentation technique under laboratory conditions andbiodegradation was determine in terms of weight loss in both low density polythene (LDPE) and biodegradable polythene.

Polythene is an important part of daily life, that’s why demand of polythene production is increasing worldwide each year but its final non-treated waste is making earth polluted. Polythene is becoming major threaten element for environment, seems lack of awareness and poor waste management in last two decade. Fungi are ubiquitously found as reported from in each and every habitat, even can survive in adverse environment. Biodegradation is a best way, if possible, to overcome this problem. Still fungal flora of decaying polythene waste is not much worked out. This piece of work was conducted in order to find out a microbial consortium for the biodegradation of polythene. Samples were collected from various water bodies of Jhansi and screened for their fungal flora. In present study 10 fungal strains were isolated from different natural decaying sites.