Abstract
Plastics have become indispensable in modern life and the material of choice in packaging applications, but they have also caused increasing plastic waste accumulation in oceans and landfills. Although there have been continuous efforts to develop biodegradable plastics, the mechanical and/or transport properties of these materials still need to be significantly improved to be suitable for replacing conventional plastic packaging materials. Here we report a class of biorenewable and degradable plastics, based on copolymers of γ-butyrolactone and its ring-fused derivative, with competitive permeability and elongation at break compared to commodity polymers and superior mechanical and transport properties to those of most promising biobased plastics. Importantly, these materials are designed with full chemical recyclability built into their performance with desired mechanical and barrier properties, thus representing a circular economy approach to plastic packaging materials.
Highlights
Plastics have become indispensable in modern life and the material of choice in packaging applications, but they have caused increasing plastic waste accumulation in oceans and landfills
We have investigated the potential of polyesters based on the PγBL core, which are designed with full chemical recyclability built into their performance, as potentially fully recyclable plastics for packaging applications
PγBL shows a ductile behavior with an elongation at break of >350%, (Supplementary Table 2), which is similar to PET20 and LDPE21
Summary
Plastics have become indispensable in modern life and the material of choice in packaging applications, but they have caused increasing plastic waste accumulation in oceans and landfills. We report a class of biorenewable and degradable plastics, based on copolymers of γ-butyrolactone and its ring-fused derivative, with competitive permeability and elongation at break compared to commodity polymers and superior mechanical and transport properties to those of most promising biobased plastics These materials are designed with full chemical recyclability built into their performance with desired mechanical and barrier properties, representing a circular economy approach to plastic packaging materials. The high permeability in the case of PLA and the poor mechanical properties in the case of PHB (a brittle material), plus their lack of high chemical recyclability[2], have limited their potential[5] Beside these approaches, the design of plastics with recyclability built into their performance aiming for a fully plastic circular economy has been considered. Being polyesters these materials have shown to hydrolytically degrade[19] which, in case of escaping from sorting and collection of plastic that has reached the end of its life, will not accumulate in the environment
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