Abstract
The concept of upcycling postconsumer plastics into higher-value products is attractive, but the challenges remain to develop a cost-effective upcycling scheme, discover property-enhancing structures, and, most importantly, install recyclability into upcycled plastics to enable a circular lifecycle. Reported herein is a convenient and effective strategy to upcycle polyester, exemplified by poly(glycolic acid) (PGA), via transesterification (TEster) in bioderived, commercially available γ-butyrolactone (BL) that serves as both the solvent and comonomer, which generates sequence-defined copolymer poly(GA-co-BL). Owing to the isolated glycolic sequence present in the copolymer created uniquely by TEster, it exhibits much-enhanced thermal stability (≥44 °C) over both homopolymers or copolymers without such sequences. This upconverted copolymer is chemically recyclable, enabling a complete recovery of pure glycolic acid and BL feedstocks.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 4570-4578 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Macromolecules |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 12 2019 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01Acknowledgements: The work done at SIOC was supported by The Thousand Talents Plan for Young Scholars of China, The Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (No. 17JC1401200) to M.H. and the work performed at CSU was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF-1664915) to E.Y.-X.C.