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New polymer design breaks the tradeoff between toughness and recyclability

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2024-10-26 05:00:03

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

Plastics underpin much of modern life—areas like medicine, technology, and food safety would be unrecognizable without plastics and their useful properties. However, the toughness of plastics, which is often desirable, also makes them a dangerous pollutant and difficult to recycle. The solution to this serious and growing problem is making plastics easier to recycle.

In a study published in Chemical Science, researchers at Osaka University have found a way to make tough, high-performance polymers, the main component of plastics, that can be broken down easily and precisely into their component parts and recycled into materials that are like new.

The main component of plastics are molecules called polymers, which are long chains of small repeating units called monomers. Current physical recycling simply reuses the polymers without breaking them down, and the recycled plastic is usually worse than the original.