• Hu, Zhitao
• Harry, Katherine

Abstract

Polyolefins are the most important and largest volume plastics produced. Unfortunately, the enormous use of plastics and lack of effective disposal or recycling options have created a plastic waste catastrophe. In this work, we report an approach to create chemically recyclable polyolefin-like materials with diverse mechanical properties through the construction of multiblock polymers from hard and soft oligomeric building blocks synthesized with ruthenium-mediated ring-opening metathesis polymerization of cyclooctenes. The multiblock polymers exhibit broad mechanical properties, spanning elastomers to plastomers to thermoplastics, while integrating a high melting transition temperature (<jats:italic>T</jats:italic><jats:sub>m</jats:sub>) and low glass transition temperature (<jats:italic>T</jats:italic><jats:sub>g</jats:sub>), making them suitable for use across diverse applications (<jats:italic>T</jats:italic><jats:sub>m</jats:sub>as high as 128°C and<jats:italic>T</jats:italic><jats:sub>g</jats:sub>as low as –60°C). After use, the different plastics can be combined and efficiently deconstructed back to the fundamental hard and soft building blocks for separation and repolymerization to realize a closed-loop recycling process.</jats:p>

Topics

• glass
• glass
• glass transition temperature
• thermoplastic
• elastomer
• Ruthenium