| Title | Circular olefin copolymers made de novo from ethylene and α-olefins |
|---|---|
| ID_Doc | 20018 |
| Authors | Han, XW; Zhang, X; Zhou, YY; Maimaitiming, A; Sun, XL; Gao, YS; Li, PZ; Zhu, BY; Chen, EYX; Kuang, XK; Tang, Y |
| Title | Circular olefin copolymers made de novo from ethylene and α-olefins |
| Year | 2024 |
| Published | Nature Communications, 15.0, 1 |
| Abstract | Ethylene/alpha-olefin copolymers are produced in huge scale and widely used, but their after-use disposal has caused plastic pollution problems. Their chemical inertness made chemical re/upcycling difficult. Ideally, PE materials should be made de novo to have a circular closed-loop lifecycle. However, synthesis of circular ethylene/alpha-olefin copolymers, including high-volume, linear low-density PE as well as high-value olefin elastomers and block copolymers, presents a particular challenge due to difficulties in introducing branches while simultaneously installing chemical recyclability and directly using industrial ethylene and alpha-olefin feedstocks. Here we show that coupling of industrial coordination copolymerization of ethylene and alpha-olefins with a designed functionalized chain-transfer agent, followed by modular assembly of the resulting AB telechelic polyolefin building blocks by polycondensation, affords a series of ester-linked PE-based copolymers. These new materials not only retain thermomechanical properties of PE-based materials but also exhibit full chemical circularity via simple transesterification and markedly enhanced adhesion to polar surfaces. Although several advances have been made in chemical Polyethylene (PE) re- and upcycling, energy-efficient and selective catalytic processes are still lacking. Here, the authors show coupling of an industrially relevant coordination copolymerization olefins with a functionalized chain-transfer agent, followed by modular assembly of the resulting telechelic polyolefin building blocks by polycondensation to afford ester-linked PE-based random and block copolymers which exhibit full chemical circularity. |
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45219-w.pdf |
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