Engineering Degradability into Corn-based Plastics

Thomas Hoye

Through this proposed project, we aim to develop a new strategy to incorporate degradable chemical entities into the backbones of polyesters, leading to more easily degraded versions of poly(lactide) (PLA) and other bioderived polyesters. The premise of this work is that we can design catalysts that can scramble polyester backbone ester linkages with sidechain esters, swapping the backbone linkage for the sidechain linkage in a process we have coined sidechain-backbone ester scrambling. We can use simple chemistry to install many types of degradable linkers into the sidechain, which upon scrambling would then contain the degradable group along the backbone.

This will allow cleavage of the plastic into smaller fragments of the polyesters following the degradation mediated by sunlight, fluoride in water, or simply in water. The resulting smaller polyester fragments can then be more easily consumed by microbes in natural settings of soil and water (ocean) or in inoculated environments of sewage treatment plants and industrial composting facilities.