Polymer Science Team Develops Additive That Can ‘Upcycle' A Wide Range Of Plastics

Reika Katsumata, assistant professor in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, and Ph.D. student Autumn Mineo are experimenting with polymer recycling to identify new, environmentally conscious chemistry and technologies for polymer reprocessing.

As a catalyst for their research, Katsumata and Mineo addressed the expanding issue of plastic production and plastic pollution and asked the question, “What if we were able to recycle plastic in a way that is truly sustainable?”

Katsumata and her team sought to create a more sustainable process for recycling and reprocessing polymers through what is known as addition-fragmentation-transfer (AFT) chemistry, a field that is focused on radical-based bond exchange reactions.

They shared their research in the article, “A Versatile Comoner Additive for Radically Recyclable Vinyl-derived Polymer,” published late last fall in the International Edition of Angewandte Chemie, a journal of the German Chemical Society.

“Everyday plastics are large molecules called polymers, comprised of repeat units, or ‘monomers,’” Katsumata explained. “Many polymers are not able to be chemically broken down and reformed, because the carbon-carbon single bonds holding monomers together are relatively stable.”

To address this stability issue, PSE researchers developed an additive that copolymerizes with conventional monomers and generates main-chain units that possess the ability to exchange through AFT chemistry.