Addressing End-of-Life Management Challenges for Hard-to-Break-Down Polymers

Synthetic polymers pose end-of-life management challenges. To address this, a team led by MIT Professor Jeremiah Johnson of the Department of Chemistry is integrating chemical deconstructability into synthetic polymers, which facilitates their degradation and provides opportunities for recycling and upcycling. The team is using a cleavable comonomer additive (CCA) approach, in which small molecules known as CCAs are incorporated into common industrially used polymers, introducing degradability and recyclability to otherwise non-recyclable polymers without altering the important properties of those materials. In work that was supported by MCSC and recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, they introduce the first effective CCA for polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), a commodity polymer with broad applications. This discovery enables the manufacturing of PMMA plastics with identical properties to existing ones, but with the potential to be degraded, sorted, recovered, and/or recycled at the end of its life using much lower energy techniques than are currently required. Moreover, their approach to CCA design can potentially be extended to other classes of polymers that currently lack circularity.