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Closed-Loop Polymer Upcycling by Installing Property-Enhancing Comonomer Sequences and Recyclability

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    Closed-Loop Polymer Upcycling by Installing Property-Enhancing Comonomer Sequences and Recyclability
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    Macromolecules

    Cite this: Macromolecules 2019, 52, 12, 4570–4578
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    https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.macromol.9b00817
    Published June 12, 2019
    Copyright © 2019 American Chemical Society
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    Abstract

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    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.

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    The Supporting Information is available free of charge on the ACS Publications website at DOI: 10.1021/acs.macromol.9b00817.

    • Materials, reagents, and methods; synthesis of PGA homopolymer; general transesterification procedures; polymer characterizations; chain-end modification of PBL; feedstock recycling of poly(GA-co-BL), computational details (PDF)

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    Macromolecules

    Cite this: Macromolecules 2019, 52, 12, 4570–4578
    Click to copy citationCitation copied!
    https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.macromol.9b00817
    Published June 12, 2019
    Copyright © 2019 American Chemical Society
    Request reuse permissions

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