Large quantities of Polylactic acid (PLA) container and injection molded products have been applied for recent year. Therefore there are mass quantities of recycled PLA products needed to be reused. This study proposed the environmental-friendly development of biodegradable film products to reuse the recycled PLA material. There were three parts of the experimental design in this project. The first part was the setup of the recycling model for the PLA recycling procedure. We used the meshing process together with the melting-extrusion process to obtain the relatively purified PLA pellets from the PLA recycling stream. The second part of study was the inclusion of property modifier to strengthen the properties of recycled PLA materials. Meanwhile the biomass (e.g. starch), modifier, and recycled PLA were compounded in the extrusion process to find the proper combination ratio and procedure for the film products, e.g. environmental-friendly shopping bag, trash bag or umbrella bag, etc. The film products were tested in the industrial scale of manufacturing process. The third part of experiment was the biodegradation test for above mentioned film products to evaluate the biodegradability effects by the inclusion of property modifiers. Besides, the measurement of endocrine disruptor in the re-made products were evaluated in this project. The success of this proposal benefitted the necessity of reusing large quantities of recycled PLA and also developed the useful environmental-friendly plastic film products for our society.

Polylactic acid, Lipase, Film