Silk offers an alternative to some microplastics

Good news! Human ingenuity can easily take care of the microplastics alarmism and hysteria!

Remember plastophobia is a serious disease! If you are suffering from it please seek medical help! 😄

The Soviet (European) Union has already dictated that microplastics must be eliminated by 2025! The dictatorship of the proletariat environmentalism and the precautionary principle!

"Some of these microplastics are intentionally added to a variety of products, including agricultural chemicals, paints, cosmetics, and detergents — amounting to an estimated 50,000 tons a year in the European Union alone, according to the European Chemicals Agency. The EU has already declared that these added, nonbiodegradable microplastics must be eliminated by 2025, so the search is on for suitable replacements, which do not currently exist. ..."

From the abstract:

"There is a compelling need across several industries to substitute non-degradable, intentionally added microplastics with biodegradable alternatives. Nonetheless, stringent performance criteria in actives’ controlled release and manufacturing at scale of emerging materials hinder the replacement of polymers used for microplastics fabrication with circular ones. Here, the authors demonstrate that active microencapsulation in a structural protein such as silk fibroin can be achieved by modulating protein protonation and chain relaxation at the point of material assembly. Silk fibroin micelles’ size is tuned from several to hundreds of nanometers, enabling the manufacturing—by retrofitting spray drying and spray freeze drying techniques—of microcapsules with tunable morphology and structure, that is, hollow-spongy, hollow-smooth, hollow crumpled matrices, and hollow crumpled multi-domain. Microcapsules degradation kinetics and sustained release of soluble and insoluble payloads typically used in cosmetic and agriculture applications are controlled by modulating fibroin's beta-sheet content from 20% to near 40%. Ultraviolet-visible studies indicate that burst release of a commonly used herbicide (i.e., saflufenacil) significantly decreases from 25% to 0.8% via silk fibroin microencapsulation. As a proof-of-concept for agrochemicals applications, a 6-day greenhouse trial demonstrates that saflufenacil delivered on corn plants via silk microcapsules reduces crop injury when compared to the non-encapsulated version."

Silk offers an alternative to some microplastics | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Researchers have developed a biodegradable system based on silk to replace microplastics added to agricultural products, paints, and cosmetics.

Microencapsulation of High-Content Actives Using Biodegradable Silk Materials (open access)