Bio-based polymers and biodegradable polymers are easily confused with each other. Although they were both developed to tackle global environmental issues, the former emphasizes reducing reliance on fossil resources, whereas the latter focuses on reducing plastics waste. Biodegradability depends eventually on the polymer's structure. While many bio-based polymers happen to be biodegradable, a lot of them are designed to be structurally identical to fossil fuel-derived polymers and are thus not biodegradable, as we shall see in the following sections. Some examples of polymers in each category are listed in Table .