Abstract
Although the polyesters known as polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs, have been around for almost a hundred years, they haven’t caught on as major components of plastics. Thanks to the ester bonds in their backbones, PHAs are biodegradable. Their brittle and thermally unstable qualities make them inferior to commonly used polyolefins, which are not biodegradable. Two research groups independently discovered they could make PHAs that have properties on par with polyolefins by modifying the monomers with methyl groups. These new PHAs could be used to make plastic bags, bottles, straws, and utensils that can potentially biodegrade or be recycled into their starting monomer or other valuable chemicals. Chemists led by Colorado State University’s Eugene Y.-X. Chen recognized that PHAs are prone to decomposition via a cis-elimination reaction that involves the hydrogens on the carbon next to the carbonyl in the PHA backbone. They reasoned that by replacing these hydrogens with methyl groups,
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