This work addresses challenges of waste recyclability in response to the call to action proposed in the industry, innovation, and infrastructure section of the United Nations’ Sustainable Global Goal Initiatives. The mass production of commodity plastics has outpaced the development of waste remediation of these products, creating an imbalance within production and waste life cycles. We illustrate how polymers prepared via reversible-deactivation radical polymerization (RDRP) can be thermally triggered to depolymerize back to monomer, with the recovered monomer being amenable to repolymerization to generate virgin polymer. This depolymerization strategy may further incentivize the translation of RDRP techniques for industrial polymer synthesis. In addition to current commodity plastic production, emerging fields such as 3D printing and lithography are positioned to adopt recyclable materials into their production methods to close the gap in life cycle circularity of polymer materials.
Learn more about this collaborative work in Chem.
