Researchers advance new route to chemically recyclable plastics
As the planet's burden of rubber and plastic trash rises unabated, scientists increasingly look to the promise of closed-loop recycling to reduce waste. A team of researchers at Princeton's Department of Chemistry announces the discovery of a new polybutadiene molecule—from a material known for over a century and used to make common products like tires and shoes—that could one day advance this goal through depolymerization.
The Chirik lab reports in Nature Chemistry that during polymerization the molecule, named (1,n'-divinyl)oligocyclobutane, enchains in a repeating sequence of squares, a previously unrealized microstructure that enables the process to go backwards, or depolymerize, under certain conditions.
In other words, the butadiene can be "zipped up" to make a new polymer; that polymer can then be unzipped back to a pristine monomer to be re-used.
The research is still at an early stage and the material's performance attributes have yet to be thoroughly explored. But the Chirik lab has provided a conceptual precedent for a chemical transformation not generally thought practical for certain commodity materials.
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