The research work by Liang Luo group entitled “Complete Degradation of a Conjugated Polymer into Green Upcycling Products by Sunlight in Air” (https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.1c04611) was recently highlighted by Journal Club of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Journal Club of PNAS highlights recent, timely papers selected by National Academy of Science member labs. Prof. Luo and his collaborator Prof. Ben Zhong Tang have also taken an interview with the journalist Amy McDermott from PNAS.
In the interview, Prof. Luo briefly introduced this work. “In this study, we use poly(deca-4,6-diynedioic acid), or PDDA, a soluble polydiacetylene with short carboxyl side chains, as a model conjugate polymer to approach such an ideal degradation. When we put a piece of PDDA film into water, the soaked polymer film disintegrated into small pieces rapidly when standing on an outdoor shelf, and finally disappeared within one week. PDDA can be completely decomposed by sunlight in air, with a dominant green upcycling product of succinic acid, representing an ideal paradigm for the degradation and upcycling of conjugated polymers. This work represents a pioneering paradigm of environmentally degradable conjugated polymers, the complete degradation of PDDA into green upcycling products by sunlight in air also validates a promising universal strategy to degrade postconsumer conjugated polymers in natural environment.”
The postulated degradation mechanism is totally different from the breakdown of other degradable plastics, for instance by hydrolysis of ester or amide bonds, says materials chemist Zhibin Guan at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the new study. The mechanism clearly doesn’t occur in the consumer plastics that litter sunny beaches. It’s possible the degradation could occur in other conjugated polymer plastics, but “it will take more work to demonstrate the generality of this mechanism,” Guan says. Ultimately, the work is “an exciting example of degradable conjugated polymers,” he adds, which could be valuable for a variety of applications, such as electronics, in the future. Polymer chemist Eugene Chen at Colorado State University in Fort Collins calls the recent work a “tour de force” that addresses several key challenges in plastic design and achieves “nearly ideal plastic degradation.” In particular, using sunlight and oxygen rather than focusing on microbial activity to break down the plastic is an advance for the field, he says.
The above research work was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on JUNE 28. Sidan Tian and Qiang Yue contributed equally to this work as first authors. Corresponding authors are Prof. Tang Ben Zhong from Hong Kong University of Science & Technology and Prof. Luo Liang from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21877042 and 22077038); the National Basic Research Plan of China (2018YFA0208903); Postdoctoral Research Foundation of China (2017M622454 and 2020T130038ZX); and Huazhong University Startup Fund.
Source of the interview:
http://blog.pnas.org/2021/07/degradable-plastic-polymer-breaks-down-in-sunlight-and-air/
