With global production levels exceeding 400 million metric tons per year, many argue that humans have left the Stone, Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages behind only to enter into a modern-day Plastic Age. Although plastics have long been promoted as recyclable, the realities of material properties, manufacturing challenges and expense mean that less than ten percent of plastics are actually processed into new goods. These poor recycling rates and slow decomposition (if you can call breakdown of the material into smaller and smaller bits of non-usable material over hundreds of years "decomposition") of plastic materials place critical stress on landfill and waste management infrastructure. The need for plastics that can truly degrade at end-of-life is pressing.
cPPA is a transient material which is capable of depolymerizing in response to a stimulus (e.g., acid, heat). Historically, the low degradation temperature of cPPA generally precluded the sort of thermal processing needed to make commercially useful devices, while cPPA’s unpredictable stability and thermal degradation behavior made any such devices too unreliable for most applications. However, resesarchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a method for enhancing the thermal stability of cyclic poly(phthalaldehyde) (“cPPA”) to enable thermal processing (e.g., manufacturing of devices made from the material) and allow for controlled degradation of the material.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/science/plastics-polymers-pollution.html