Hundreds of millions of tons of single-use plastic ends up in landfills every year, and even the small percentage of plastic that gets recycled can’t last forever. But our group of materials scientists has developed a new method for creating and deconstructing polymers that could lead to more easily recycled plastics – ones that don’t require you to carefully sort out all your recycling on trash day.
In the century since their conception, people have come to understand the enormous impacts – beneficial as well as detrimental – plastics have on human lives and the environment. As a group of polymer scientists dedicated to inventing sustainable solutions for real-world problems, we set out to tackle this issue by rethinking the way polymers are designed and making plastics with recyclability built right in.
