At this stage, human production and life are very dependent on plastics, so it is necessary to find a sustainable plastic “alternative”. However, other sustainable plastics, including bioplastics in this article, will be picked up by users before performance can't replace the currently used plastics. In order to make the "alternatives" really stand, scientists have to help.
Bioplastics: a new way to produce plastic polymers
Swiss scientists reported on the 24th in the British journal Nature Communications a new way to produce plastic polymers that can produce bioplastics that are similar to, but more sustainable than traditional plastics, in just 30 minutes. This study shows that bioplastics based on renewable resources, bottle-grade polyethylene furan esters, have been able to be obtained in a very short time.
In 2018, UNEP focused on the issue of disposable plastic pollution for the first time, and set the theme of this year's World Environment Day as "speed-and-shoot" because our planet is surrounded by plastic. A huge marine plastic accumulation area between California and Hawaii is currently floating more than 79,000 tons of plastic waste. According to the UN Environment Agency, without restrictions, by 2050, there will be more plastic waste in the ocean than fish.
Compared to conventional plastics, sustainable polymers typically perform poorly, including discoloration and thermal degradation, which are not suitable for specific everyday applications. Scientists believe that polyethylene furanate has certain potential, but it will begin to degrade after it is formed, because its reaction time is very long during the production process.
Bioplastics: a new way to produce plastic polymers
This time, the scientist of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, Massimo Mobydale and his colleagues proposed a ring-opening polymerization method to form a long-chain bottle-grade polyethylene furan ester. According to this method, a starting material, a smaller cyclic polyethylene furan ester chain, is first mixed with a tin-based catalyst using a high boiling point solvent; once the polymer product begins to form, it melts under the reaction conditions, promoting the initial reaction. Material conversion.
The research team said that the reaction can be completed in 30 minutes using the method, the resulting polyethylene furoate has the desired properties, and the degradation and discoloration problems have been minimized.