Photodegradable polar-functionalized polyethylenes

Chaoqun Wang; Jian Xia; Yuxing Zhang; Xiaoqiang Hu; Zhongbao Jian

doi:10.1093/nsr/nwad039

Photodegradable polar-functionalized polyethylenes

Natl Sci Rev. 2023 Feb 16;10(7):nwad039. doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwad039. eCollection 2023 Jul.

Authors

Chaoqun Wang^{1

2}, Jian Xia¹, Yuxing Zhang^{1

2}, Xiaoqiang Hu^{1

2}, Zhongbao Jian^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130022, China.
² School of Applied Chemistry and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China.

Abstract

The degradation of plastics has attracted much attention from the global community. Polyethylenes (PEs), as the most abundant synthetic plastics, are most frequently studied. PE is non-degradable and non-polar because of the sole presence of the pure hydrocarbon components. Concurrent incorporation of both in-chain cleavable and functional groups into the PE chain is an effective pathway to overcome the non-degradable and non-polar issue; however, the method for achieving this pathway remains elusive. Here, we report a strictly non-alternating (>99%) terpolymerization of ethylene with CO and fundamental polar monomers via a coordination-insertion mechanism using late transition metal catalysts, which effectively prevents the formation of undesired chelates originating from both co-monomers under a low CO concentration. High-molecular-weight linear PEs with both in-chain isolated keto (>99%) and main-chain functional groups are prepared. The incorporation of key low-content isolated keto groups makes PEs photodegradable while retaining their desirable bulk material properties, and the introduction of polar functional groups considerably improves their surface properties.

Keywords: C1 chemistry; degradable plastic; homogeneous catalysis; non-alternating copolymerization; polyolefin.