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 ...

Rutgers scientists have developed plastics that can be programmed to break down at specific rates by drawing on a natural principle. Their approach could provide a meaningful new way to tackle the ...

ORNL's invention may change plastic's environmental fate by rearranging polymeric building blocks to customize the properties of plastics. Molecular subunits link to produce polymer chains that can ...

Hundreds of millions of tons of single-use plastic end 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 ...

Already, somewhere in the desert of the American Southwest, your future, greener tires may be growing. The evergreen shrub Guayule — which literally translates to “rubber” — is native to the area and ...

Researchers have created a high-performance polymer that can be chemically recycled without compromising its heat and chemical resistance. The revolutionary design includes a directing group that ...

ORNL’s invention may change plastic’s environmental fate by rearranging polymeric building blocks to customize the properties ...

Different polymer recycling methods, such as chemical recycling and mechanical recycling, can be used to manage plastic waste and minimize its impact on humans and the environment. Polymer recycling ...

To upcycle the polymers of discarded plastics, chemists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory invented a way to generate new macromolecules with more valuable properties than those of the starting material ...

Katherine Harry receives funding from RePLACE (Redesigning Polymers to Leverage a Circular Economy) funded by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy. Emma Rettner receives funding from ...