Manuscript received December 3, 2024; revised January 17, 2025; accepted February 2, 2025; published February 25, 2025.
Abstract—Traditional petroleum-sourced materials are not biodegradable, and plastics that are difficult to degrade cause environmental pollution, plastic buildup, and ecosystem threats. PLA materials are made from lactic acid, a fully degradable material. It is therefore immune to these problems and has a low environmental impact. Advantages of PLA materials over traditional plastics include degradability, environmental friendliness, and renewable resources. Therefore, the topic of this review is the properties and applications of PLA material. In the literature review, we first introduced the basic properties and degradation process of PLA. Then the processing and applications of PLA are reviewed. In this part, hot-melt extrusion, injection molding, blow molding, and thermoforming are the four major techniques for PLA processing. In addition, four main application fields of PLA, namely the medical/biomedical industry, packaging/food packaging, automotive industry, and agriculture were introduced. Finally, from the perspective of applications, a global market overview is provided, mainly including domestic and overseas markets. This paper analyzed the advantages and drawbacks of PLA materials and further discussed the extended applications of PLA material, including new products and manufacturing technologies. Notably, 3D printing technology is a promising and advanced manufacturing technology and has the potential to be applied in many aspects of PLA production in the future.
Keywords—Polylactic Acid (PLA), biodegradable, polymer, plastics, composites
Cite: Lejia Tang, "A Review of Polylactic Acid as a Biodegradable Polymer,"
International Journal of Engineering and Technology, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 55-61, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).
