Supervisor

Associate Professor Zhongfan Jia
Jia, Zhongfan (Associate Professor)
zhongfan.jia@flinders.edu.au
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Project description

Approximately 4.8 to 12.7 million tons of land-based synthetic plastic debris escaped into the ocean every year, resulting in about 80 % of marine litter consists of plastic. Such plastic waste becomes the leading cause of death of marine organisms. Marine biopolymers, such as seaweed polysaccharides, chitin/chitosan, and collagen are sustainable resources for renewable biopolymers. These characteristics make marine biopolymers ideal resources for next-generation degradable bioplastics. However, there remains come hurdles for the application of these biopolymers in producing bioplastics that possess comparable thermal, physical, mechanical, and processing properties to synthetic polymers. As such, developing a green chemical modification of biopolymers that enable feasible mass-production of mechanically strong bioplastics but maintain their degradability could overcome those hurdles and promote the widely spread applications of marine-based bioplastics. This project aims to create new alginate-based materials that possess strong but tuneable mechanical strength and, most importantly, self-healing properties for next-generation of bioplastics.


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