The anaerobic biodegradation of poly(lactic) acid textiles in photosynthetic microbial fuel cells: Self-sustained bioelectricity generation

Poly(lactic) acid (PLA) is a promising material due to the complete biodegradability and environmental-friendly characteristics, but it is difficult to decompose by traditional anaerobic composting. Photosynthetic microbial fuel cells (MFC) are envisaged as a potential bioenergy harvesting techniques in recent years. In this work, the anaerobic biodegradation of PLA textiles for bioelectricity generation was explored in a dual chamber MFC devices using the hybrid anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria (APB). The result showed that the surface of PLA textiles appeared the widespread damage by SEM micrographs observation, and the corresponding weight loss was 26.67%. The analysis of FT-IR suggested that the breakage process was a biochemical action due to the function of depolymerase. Meanwhile, a stable current density generation of 4.4 ± 0.2 mA/cm2 (500 Ω external resistor) at PLA textiles concentration of 1 g/L was obtained under the shortage of other carbon sources. However, the microbial community structure was obvious difference before and after the test. Moreover, the exploration will provide more potential information for self-sustained bioelectricity generation of MFC.