Materials made from organic polymers representa significant part of nearly every consumer product offered today.The advent of plastics as a commodity material has triggered majoradvances in medicine and food preservation as well as improvementof energy efficiency in cars and aircraft through weight reduction. Although plastics have in many ways revolutionizedthe way we live, they have also had a massive impact on our environment.Despite the near ubiquity of recycling bins in our homes and workplaces,much of our plastic waste ends up in landfills, or worse, dispersedin the environment, wreaking havoc in our ecosystem. Much of thissituation can be attributed to the irresponsible use and managementof plastic waste. However, many types of plastics cannot be easilyreused or recycled, even in the hands of the most conscientious consumers.In recent years, there have been considerable efforts put toward theproduction of polymers that can be made from green or renewable sourcesas well as those that can degrade into benign byproducts or even theirconstituent monomers. However, for many applications, there simplyare no suitable “green” replacement plastics. In caseswhere these materials cannot be easily recycled, the plastics areeither “downcycled”, meaning that they are reprocessedfor use in other applications as lower value materials, or simplydiscarded into landfills or other waste streams. In their latest workpublished in this issue of , Dichtel, Ellison, and co-workers show how simplechemistry can be used to give new life to previously unrecyclableplastics by harnessing the power of dynamic covalent chemistry. Theycreated a method that activates covalent cross-links in polyurethane(PU) foams to break and reform rapidly during the recycling process,allowing polymers to be melted and reshaped into new products ( ).
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