Cooperative Waste Utilization: Precision Polymers from Carbon Dioxide and Elemental Sulfur

• Applicant: Professor Alex Plajer, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Preparatory and Physical Chemistry of Polymers
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 542928411

Synthetic polymers are an integral part of our modern society, and their production is expected to nearly double by 2050. However, the majority of these polymers consist of robust C-C bonds in the polymer backbone, leading to uncontrollable amounts of plastic waste worldwide. In contrast, the incorporation of oxygen or sulfur centers in polymers promises polymerizations closer to chemical equilibrium, chemically adaptable polymer chains, and increased physical, chemical, and biochemical degradability. This not only enables novel chemical recycling processes such as polymer-to-monomer recycling but also allows for the reprocessing of networks through chemical re-linking of chains. It will be necessary, for reasons of both sustainability and economic viability, to derive the raw materials for future materials from easily available and renewable sources or from free waste products of other industries. Considering these opportunities and challenges, this proposal aims to develop new cooperative catalytic methods to obtain polymers from complex mixtures of monomers in a precise and controlled manner. Industrial by-products such as elemental sulfur (S8) and carbon dioxide (CO2) will be used as building blocks to generate novel polymer structures with in-built cross-linking points. Due to the lability of the sulfur-sulfur bond, the derived networks are expected to be thermally reprocessable, allowing for reuse.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants