Production of biopolymer from dairy waste: An approach to alternate synthetic plastic

Abstract

Plastics are inevitable part of our modern life and used in different sectors of society like packaging, consumer products and many more. Synthetic polymers are almost not degradable by natural processes in the environment. Present work illustrates an effort to isolate bio-polymer producing bacterial strains from dairy industrial influents. Ten bacterial colonies were isolated which were stained using Sudan Black B dye in order to test their ability to produce bio polymer like granules. Out of ten, five strains were found to produce bio-polymer like granules. These fives isolates were further grown at different pH, incubation periods, salt concentration and different carbon sources to know the optimum growth and production. Bio-polymer like granules was extracted by sodium hypochlorite chloroform method and estimated the accumulation of granules. Two strains were found with highest bio-polymer accumulation when the buttermilk was used as one of the cheaper carbon sources. The study shows that PHB accumulation depends on residual biomass is inversely proportionate with the PHB accumulation in the cell.