Abstract:
Environmental problems have been drastically increasing in present especially packaging
plastics especially polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene. Due to their versatile
functionalization, acetophenone and benzophenone derivatives with nitro, bromo and amino groups
using as plastic additives were synthesized. To understand their photo-reactivity, rate of autodegradation
and rate of photo-oxidation were initially investigated under ultraviolet by monitoring
carbonyl index (CI) in benzene solution in hexane solution, respectively. Then rate of photodegradadtion
catalyzed by such photo-sensitive ketones was studied in LDPE, HDPE, PP and PS
films by monitoring CI, Tensile strength and %Weight loss. Most of the ketones showed photocatlytic
degradation of the plastics films, especially PP and PS which can be rapidly totally ruptured
less than a week. However, degradation of HDPE films under the same condition appeared to be
sluggish. It is important to note that the nitro derivatives of both acetophenone and benzophenone
showed the most reactive while the bromo derivatives showed about the same or lower reactivity
than the starting acetophenone and benzophenone.