OPTIMIZING MAIN VARIABLES FOR CREATING A BIODEGRADABLE PLASTIC USING BANANA PEELS

Plastic pollution covers the Earth with plastic garbage and particles dispersed in the environment that gives severe damages for wildlife habitat, and even to humans. Plastics that function as pollutants are divided into the category of micro-, meso-, or macro debris, based on particle size. Most plastics are not biodegradable and takes a long time to be degraded chemically. Plastic wastes are detrimental to animals who consume them or even come in close contact with them since plastics don’t quickly disintegrate away in the environment. But it’s not just terrestrial animals being affected by the plastic pollution, a lot of that plastic that we litter float down to the ocean, leaving fatal damages to many marine animals. It should be imperative to create a plastic that might be biodegradable in the environment for traditional plastics do nothing but harm our environment. Banana peels might be the perfect choice to be created as biodegradable plastic, since it is regularly thrown out and, they don’t have any other uses. This study attempted to find the optimal conditions of multiple variables which included the amount of metabisulfite, banana paste mass, and concentration of HCl, glycerol and NaOH volume, oven temperature and oven time. Each banana plastic was created and tested by the weight force test. The study found that the optimal conditions for creating excellent characteristics of banana plastic were 200 ul of 0.1 N HCl, 2.0 ml glycerol, 200 ul of 0.1 M NaOH, 120°C oven temperature, 120 minute oven time when worked with 25 gram of pureed banana peel. The biodegradable capability of banana plastic created here was linearly related with treatment time in sodium metabisulfite. More study might be needed for their practical applications.