Scientists succeeded in obtaining environmentally friendly plastic from sugar with unique properties
Pollution of the world with plastic waste is growing every year. Therefore, scientists are actively looking for alternatives that will allow in the future to create plastic from environmentally friendly components, which at the same time quickly decomposes without causing harm to the environment the world.
So, in the course of regular experiments, an international team of scientists was able to obtain a new form of plastic with unique mechanical properties, and components derived from regular sugar.
How and by whom plastic was obtained from sugars
This discovery was made by scientists from the University of Birmingham (UK) and Duke University (USA), who decided to turn their attention to compounds such as isoidide and isomannide, which were obtained from ordinary Sahara.
So scientists managed to get polymers based on these compounds. And the plastic obtained on the basis of isoidide turned out to be quite rigid and malleable and differed little in these properties from ordinary high-quality plastics.
And the polymer based on isomannide proved to be just as strong, but also showed a high degree of elasticity, which even made it possible to restore the original shape of the plastic after a slight deformations.
What is more remarkable, both types of plastic retained their properties even after processing (grinding and heat treatment).
After that, scientists applied a method such as stereochemistry in order to model and, thus, study how one or another arrangement of atoms in the compounds of plastic will allow you to get different properties plastic.
Then scientists in the laboratory created plastics in which two blocks were used at once based on isoidide and isomannide, which made it possible to obtain plastic with customizable mechanical properties and speed decomposition.
At this stage, the team has already submitted all the necessary documents to obtain a patent for the invention, as well as engaged in the search for industrial partners to bring new plastics into a full-fledged commercial usage.
So, it is likely that in the near future we will see an environmentally friendly and at the same time rapidly degradable plastic obtained from sugar. In the meantime, scientists continue to work on improving the technology for producing customizable plastics, as well as on reducing the cost of its production.
The scientists shared the results of the work already done on the pages of the journal Journal of the American Chemical Society.
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