Plastic pollution has become a global environmental issue, making it necessary to explore the environmental disposal technology for plastic waste. Recently, we and other researchers have individually found microorganisms or enzymes from nature that can degrade synthetic plastic. These findings indicated that the capability of these microorganisms or enzymes to degrade plastic could be used for the disposal of plastic waste. Polyurethane (PUR) was one of the most used general plastic and its plastic waste occupied 30% of the total volume of different plastic waste. This review tried to provide a comprehensive summary of the researches on microbial degradation of PUR plastic in the past 70 years since its invention, and focused on the PUR-degrading fungi, bacteria, genes or enzymes, degradation products and the corresponding biological disposal technologies. We finally proposed the key scientific challenges on the development of high efficient biological disposal for PUR waste in the perspective researches.
未被合理处置的废塑料污染已成为全球性的环境问题，探索塑料废弃物的无害化处理技术势在必行。近来，研究证实了自然界中存在可以降解塑料的微生物及酶。利用微生物或酶对废塑料进行生物处理成为可能。聚氨酯塑料 (Polyurethane, PUR) 是广泛应用的通用塑料之一，其废弃物量已占到所有废塑料总体积的30%。文中将PUR 塑料发明应用70 年来有关微生物降解的研究进行了全面综述，对PUR 塑料降解真菌、细菌、降解基因与酶、降解产物及相关的生物处理技术系统等进行了总结与分析，并对实现PUR 废塑料高效生物处理需解决的关键科学问题进行了展望。.
Keywords: biotreatment; depolymerase; microbial degradation; plastic pollution; polyurethane.