A High-Throughput Approach to Chemically Recyclable Polyolefins*

The lack of a “closed loop” in the plastics carbon economy has driven the vast increase in the quantity of waste plastics with low recyclability and detrimental environmental impacts. This is in part due to the lack of chemical functionality in the structure of commodity polyolefin plastics, making their (chemical) degradation into useful materials a significant chemical challenge. This presentation will detail our studies into the design of polyolefin-like polymers that can be broken down into macromonomers and re-polymerized through the incorporation of chemically-labile chemistries. We are specifically interested in accessing polyethylene-like materials with incorporated functionality that can be tuned to enable the depolymerization of the material to macromonomer and subsequently re-polymerized to “close the loop”. This presentation will detail the discovery of structure-property relationships of these polyolefin-like materials utilizing a high-throughput synthetic approach. An investigation of depolymerization/repolymerization processes and kinetics will also be presented.