The Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences (XMAS 2025)

1495 / 2024-09-27 19:42:43

The interaction and evolution process of "aging process microbial community structure" of biodegradable plastics in natural bay wetlands

Biodegradable Plastics; Near-shore; Degradation; 16S rRNA; Bacterial community

Biodegradable plastics (BPs) are a suitable alternative to conventional plastics. Still, their excessive or unplanned use may disrupt the abundance and community structure of the microbial population. To this end, a 58-day experiment in which biodegradable plastic objects, such as bags and boxes, were exposed to near-coastal seawater was conducted. They also assessed how they affected the diversity and organization of bacterial populations in seawater and on the surface of BP's goods. It is evident that after the exposure time, both BP's bag and box products deteriorate in the ocean to varying degrees. The results of high-throughput sequencing of bacterial communities in seawater and those colonized on BPs products reveal significant differences in microbial community structures between seawater and BPs plastic samples. These suggest that the degradation of biodegradable plastics is shadowed by microorganisms and exposure time, while BP products influence the structural characteristics of microbial communities.