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Production and closed-loop recycling of biomass-based malleable materials
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Researchers developed a method to create recyclable, repairable plastics directly from unprocessed wood waste by combining it with adaptable polymer networks, offering a potentially scalable path to greener plastic alternatives that could reduce reliance on fossil-fuel-based materials.
The search of biomass-based substitutes for fossil-based plastics has become a pressing task due to the severe long-term threats of plastic wastes to the ecosystem. However, the development in this area is strongly impeded by the high cost of biomass separation and the poor processability of unseparated biomass. Herein, we demonstrate, for the first time, an efficient and scalable method to generate greener plastics by directly integrating unseparated biomass waste (i.e., wood powder) with crosslinked covalent adaptable networks. Through a simple compression molding process, the wood biomass and polymer particles can be fused together to form a continuous material, which is endowed with repairability, reprocessibility, and closed-loop full recyclability. The method demonstrated in this work paves the way for largescale industrial production of environmentally friendly biomass- based plastics.
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