The challengue

Plastics are everywhere. Analyses of water, soil and even biological organisms confirm this primary impression. This is the result of an annual growth in global polymer production that has consistently outpaced global gross domestic product and population growths. The properties of strength and durability, that make plastics so useful during their functional lifetimes, are severe disadvantages at end-of-life, as these materials are overwhelmingly landfilled or leaked into the environment.

A large fraction (40 %) of post- consumer- waste (PCW) packaging plastics is destined for landfill, where they will lose nearly all their embedded value. Moreover, only 2 % of all recovered plastic packaging waste is returned to the same or similar-quality applications.

The solution

In this context, the next grand challenge for polymer chemistry is to develop materials and processes that can be efficiently recycled directly into their own starting materials, i.e. chemical recycling to monomers (CRM) or to products like crude oil fractions. Polymers produced from recovered monomer feedstocks have no loss of properties; moreover, the process recovers embedded value and mitigates environmental effects. Yet, CRM capability is not sufficient to establish an ideal polymer economy — polymer performance must meet the demands of diverse applications.