Credit: ICIQ/Francesco Della Monica
Finding innovative and sustainable solutions to our material needs is one of the core objectives of green chemistry. The myriad plastics that envelop our daily life - from mattresses to food and cars - are mostly made from oil-based monomers which are the building blocks of polymers. Therefore, finding bio-based monomers for polymer synthesis is attractive to achieve more sustainable solutions in materials development.
In a paper published in
ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, researchers from the Kleij group present a new route to prepare biobased polyesters with tuneable properties. The researchers are building upon the multifunctional structure of the terpene β-elemene: three double bonds which have distinct reactivity, allowing to selectively transform these bonds and thus tweaking the functionalities in the backbone of the polymer. This multi-functional terpene scaffold is rather unique and allows to fine-tune structural diversity