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Sustainable polymers

Nature Reviews Methods Primers volume 2, Article number: 46 (2022) Cite this article

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Abstract

Sustainable polymers are materials derived from renewable, recycled and waste carbon resources and their combinations, which at the end of life can be recycled, biodegraded or composted. Sustainable polymers also exhibit reduced environmental impact throughout their life cycle. This Primer presents an overview of the research in and potential of sustainable polymers, with a focus on their life cycle, synthetic routes from renewable carbon feedstocks, production, material characterization, applications, end of life, data reproducibility and limitations faced, and provides a brief outlook. The Primer also briefly covers other carbon feedstocks such as carbon dioxide and wastes, including agricultural and woody residues. Although still in their infancy, new sustainable polymers are already finding applications in packaging, automotive parts and 3D printing. This Primer also discusses the headwinds facing the adoption of sustainable polymers, including complexities of recycling and composting, manufacturing scale-up, data reproducibility, deposition and potential solutions. Development of sustainable polymers will accelerate the age of sustainable polymers and create a truly circular economy for plastics by reducing production and use of virgin plastics from finite resources.

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Fig. 1: Life cycle of sustainable polymers.
Fig. 2: Synthesis of sustainable polymers from renewable feedstocks to bio-based polymers.
Fig. 3: Routes to some representative sustainable polymers synthesized from biomass feedstocks.
Fig. 4: End of life of sustainable polymers.
Fig. 5: Schematic of output properties and sustainability measurement.
Fig. 6: 3D printing of sustainable polymers and their applications.
Fig. 7: Successful commercial and emerging application examples of sustainable polymers.
Fig. 8: The future of sustainable polymers.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the financial support of the Ontario Research Fund, Research Excellence Program; Round 9 (ORF-RE09) Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities; the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA)/University of Guelph — Ontario Agri-Food Innovation Alliance; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC); and the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) through Bioindustrial Innovation Canada (BIC) Bioproducts AgSci Cluster Program. The Université de Mons (UMONS) is grateful to the European Commission and Wallonia for the financial support in the frame of the FEDER-LCFM project.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bioproducts Discovery and Development Centre, Department of Plant Agriculture, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

    Amar K. Mohanty & Manjusri Misra

  2. School of Engineering, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

    Amar K. Mohanty & Manjusri Misra

  3. Department of Chemical Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China

    Feng Wu

  4. Centre d’Innovation et de Recherche des Matériaux et Polymères (CIRMAP), Université de Mons, Mons, Belgium

    Rosica Mincheva & Jean-Marie Raquez

  5. Department of Fibre and Polymer Technology, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Minna Hakkarainen

  6. Ford Research and Innovation Center, Ford Motor Company, Dearborn, MI, USA

    Deborah F. Mielewski

  7. Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Michigan State University, Lansing, MI, USA

    Ramani Narayan

  8. Department of Human Centered Design, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Anil N. Netravali

Authors
  1. Amar K. Mohanty
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Contributions

Introduction (A.K.M., D.F.M., F.W. and R.N.); Experimentation (R.M., J.-M.R., M.H., F.W. and A.N.N.); Results (F.W., M.M., R.M. and J.-M.R.); Applications (M.H., D.F.M., R.M., J.-M.R., A.K.M. and A.N.N.); Reproducibility and data deposition (R.N. and M.M.); Limitations and optimizations (M.M. and F.W); Outlook (A.K.M., F.W., D.F.M., M.H., R.N. and A.N.N.); Overview of the Primer (all authors).

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amar K. Mohanty.

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Nature Reviews Methods Primers thanks Arantxa Eceiza, who co-reviewed with Ainara Saralegi, Martin Koller and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Related links

Circular economy: https://unctad.org/topic/trade-and-environment/circular-economy

GaBi: https://gabi.sphera.com/international/index/

LCA database: https://nexus.openlca.org/

OpenLCA: https://www.openlca.org/

Plastics Microbial Biodegradation Database (PMBD): http://pmbd.genome-mining.cn/home/

Plastic pollution: https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution

SimaPro: https://simapro.com/

Sustainable Development Goals: https://sdg-tracker.org/

Supplementary information

Glossary

Sustainable

Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Circular economy

A closed-loop economic system that targets zero waste and pollution throughout material life cycles.

Chemical recycling

Relates to technologies that convert polymeric waste back to monomers, oligomers or other functional chemicals that can be used as raw materials for manufacturing new plastic articles.

Bioeconomy

An economy where goods are made from responsibly produced biomass.

Life cycle assessment

(LCA). A methodology to assess the environmental impacts associated with each stage of a product’s life.

Thermoset

A specific class of polymers that form well-defined, irreversible, chemical crosslinked 3D networks.

Glass transition temperature

(Tg). The temperature at or above which the molecular segments start to move.

Ugi reaction

A multicomponent reaction in organic chemistry involving a ketone or aldehyde, an amine, an isocyanide and a carboxylic acid to form a bis-amide (named after Ivar Karl Ugi).

Mass-based metric

A measurement of the atom efficiency of chemical reactions comparing the mass of desired product with the mass of waste.

E-factor

The ratio of the mass of waste per mass of product in a chemical reaction.

Reactive extrusion

A manufacturing method carried out in an extruder, which combines chemical polymerization and extrusion processing into a single step.

Upcycling

A recycling system in which the recycled material is of higher quality and functionality than the original material.

Downcycling

A recycling system in which the recycled material is of lower quality and functionality than the original material.

Ergoneutral

A reaction in which Gibbs free energy is zero under a defined set of reactive conditions.

Linear economic model

An economic system consisting of the ‘take, make, dispose’ model in which most goods end up discarded as waste.

Radiocarbon dating

A method that uses the level of radioactive carbon (14C) to determine the age of carbonaceous materials, as 14C decays over time — older artefacts have less 14C than younger (newer) ones.

Biogenic carbon

The organic and inorganic carbon originating from renewable plant-biomass carbon feedstock.

Vat polymerization

A photopolymerization method in 3D printing based on light irradiation through a reservoir (vat) filled with photocurable materials.

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Mohanty, A.K., Wu, F., Mincheva, R. et al. Sustainable polymers. Nat Rev Methods Primers 2, 46 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43586-022-00124-8

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