it can take 100 to 400 years for petroleumbased plastic bottles and films to biodegrade. it&rsquos an issue that is known to be clogging our water ways &mdash one study estimates that there could be 270,000 tons of everyday plastics floating in the world&rsquos oceans &mdash and has helped accelerate a push towards more ecofriendly alternatives.according to a researcher working with the upvehuuniversity of the basque county in spain, a potential answer could be also out in the deep blue. in recently published work entitled, &ldquoquality attributes of map packaged readytoeat baby carrots by using chitosanbased coatings,&rdquo researcher itsaso leceta showed that chitosanbased coatings can preserve food just as well as petroleumbased coatings with less environmental impact.&ldquochitosan is made out of the shells of prawns, king prawns and other crustaceans. the environment benefits from the use of this waste material and, what is more, the resulting product, chitosan, is biodegradable," leceta said."chitosan also has antimicrobial properties, so it is highly suited to the food industry, as it reduces the microbial load &mdash in this case &mdash of carrots. that is why their properties have been preserved better,&rdquo she added.the work was done for leceta&rsquos ph.d. thesis and was mostly conducted at the polytechnic school of donostiasan sebastian and used the results of a collaboration with the department of food and nutritional sciences of university college cork in ireland.while successful in a lab, leceta notes there would be significant hurdles to getting chitosanbased plastics in grocery stores.according to leceta, we are a long way from being able to use this method for massscale production. and while chitosanbased coatings would be more biodegradable than petroleumbased plastics, producing it would still cause pollution.&ldquothe manufacturing of chitosan, unlike the production of conventional plastics, has yet to be optimized. once it has been optimized, the environmental impact of chitosan will be reduced even further,&rdquo leceta says. 
