Biodegradation of Plastic Using Termites and their Gut Microbiota: A Mini Review

Abstract

Nature’s pollution is human created activity and human crosses the entire barrier to causing pollution and posing a high significant risk to health of all animals and also for plants. Plastics are the one of the major reason behind this. The high use of plastics material create high solid waste and this solid waste having no completely and fast degradation methods are available in nature. Their degradation also releases various harmful toxic substances which are harmful for environment. Various methods are available for treatment of plastic such as photo-oxidative degradation, thermal degradation, ozone-induced degradation, mechano-chemical degradation, catalytic degradation, and bio degradation. All these methods pose threat to the environment except the method of Biodegradation. Degradation of plastics using microbes are very eco-friendly degradation and causing no any side effect on nature. Termites are the major soil insect that are also capable to degrade plastics using their gut microbiota. Lot of microbial diversity present in termites gut but only few having potential to degrade plastics. In this review we mainly focus on the diversity of termites and their gut microbial fauna that having potential to degrade plastics and their different polymers.