Analysis on the Development and Application of Biodegradable Polymers

Nowadays, synthetic high polymer materials have already been used in almost every facet of our life, but the use of them creates huge environmental problems to the world. The overuse of "white trash" or the explosive increase in landfill are all extremely urgent problems influencing the environment. Since more people begin to have global environment concerns, the biodegradable polymers have become an important topic. By degrading or decomposing with interactions from microorganisms, the process actually forms environmental-friendly products. In general, there are two basic kinds of biodegradable polymers, which are synthetic biodegradable polymers and natural biodegradable polymers [1]. Overall, natural biodegradable polymers seem to be superior than synthetic biodegradable polymers in some aspects. In order to further explain the developments and applications of biodegradable polymers, this paper also includes basic concepts of biodegradable reactions, characteristics of several individual biodegradable polymer, and fields of applications of biodegradable polymers. In addition, this paper also shows some influencing factors—not only from the internal characteristics of materials, but also external conditions from the environment—to reveal that different conditions or different materials may lead to different bio-degradation results. To conclude, biodegradable polymers are new technologies that people still research on it and it has a broad space for future development and exploitation.