Plasticizers are substances those are added to a material to make it softer and more flexible, to increase its plasticity, to decrease its viscosity, or to decrease friction during its handling in manufacture. Due to increasing awareness of health and environmental concerns, along with the toxicity of synthetic plasticizers such as phthalates, the demand for biobased materials for various end-uses in the bioplastic industry has drawn more attention. For instance, there is growing attention in the utilization of renewable resources such as plant oils, cardanol, citric acid, sugar, curcumin, and succinate esters in the development of new biobased plasticizers.
With rising environmental concerns and depletion of petrochemical resources, biobased plasticizers have been paid more attention. Several types of common biobased plasticizers are as follows.
Biobased epoxidized plasticizers mainly include epoxidized vegetable oils, epoxidized fatty acidesters and epoxy group containing cardanol derivatives. To date, vegetable oils and epoxidized fatty acid esters have been widely used in the plastic industry. For example, epoxidized soybean oil (ESO) is a collection of organic compounds obtained from the epoxidation of soybean oil that have been widely used as plasticizers and heat stabilizers of PVC materials.
The polyester plasticizer is usually prepared by polycondensation of dibasic acid and diol with the characteristics of large molecular weight, better water resistance, excellent solvent extraction and longer service life. Renewable biodegradable polyester plasticizers have been paid more attention by industry and academia due to its good research and application prospects. For example, hyperbranched esters deriving from glycidol via a green one-pot process using neither toxic solvents nor expensive catalysts have been used to replaced dioctyl phthalate (DOP) as main plasticizer.
Citrate acid esters (CAEs), based on natural citric acid, have been proposed as a class of phthalate substitute plasticizers for PLA, PVC and other materials. There have been more than 50 kinds of citric acid ester plasticizers, and about 15 kinds of them have been produced at large-scale by the industrialized manufacturing industry. Acetyl tributyl citrate (ATBC) and tributyl citrate (TBC) are two typical ones which have been studied in-depth and industrialized.
Glycerol is a by-product in biodiesel production. Glycerol esters obtained from naturally resourced glycerol can be used as PVC plasticizers in applications requiring low hardness and good flexibility.
Plant oils, such as cashew oil, soybean oil and castor oil, were found to be good plasticizers for different rubbers. For example, soybean oil, as one of the most productive plant oils, is a reactive plasticizer for rubber because the double bonds in it could react with the double bonds in the rubber molecular chains during the crosslinking procedure.
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