Production and closed-loop recycling of biomass-based malleable materials
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Published online 2 June 2020 | https://doi.org/10.1007/s40843-020-1349-5
Production and closed-loop recycling of biomassbased malleable materials 1,2
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Zhiping Su , Yiming Hu , Xiye Yang , Rong Long , Yinghua Jin , Xiaohui Wang and 2* Wei Zhang ABSTRACT The search of biomass-based substitutes for fossil-based plastics has become a pressing task due to the severe long-term threats of plastic wastes to the ecosystem. However, the development in this area is strongly impeded by the high cost of biomass separation and the poor processability of unseparated biomass. Herein, we demonstrate, for the first time, an efficient and scalable method to generate greener plastics by directly integrating unseparated biomass waste (i.e., wood powder) with crosslinked covalent adaptable networks. Through a simple compression molding process, the wood biomass and polymer particles can be fused together to form a continuous material, which is endowed with repairability, reprocessibility, and closed-loop full recyclability. The method demonstrated in this work paves the way for largescale industrial production of environmentally friendly biomass-based plastics. Keywords: wood biomass, plastic, polyimine, recyclable, vitrimers
INTRODUCTION Plastics are the most widely used man-made materials and have become the integral part of our modern life. They are lightweight, durable, low-cost and hardly replaceable by other synthetic materials [1]. Since their first common use around 1950, the world has produced over 8300 million tons of plastics [2,3], most of which are produced from petroleum-based chemicals and hard to degrade [4–6]. Only recently have people realized the long-term threats of plastic wastes, which enter ecosystem as millimeter- and micrometer-sized particles after natural fragmentation [7,8]. The use of polymeric biomass as a green replacement for traditional fossil-based materials has gained momentum in the past few years due to their 1 2
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abundance, renewability, low cost and biodegradability [9–14]. However, natural lignocellulose biomass is a complex mixture of cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin, and others [15]. The separation of biomass components for biomaterials on an industrial scale imposes high demands on cost and energy consumption. Moreover, due to strong hydrogen-bond network of polysaccharides, biomass does not melt or soften, and thus cannot be processed. The poor processability together with low mechanical properties, and hydrophilicity of biomass make them hard to be used like conventional plastics. As a result, there has been little recent success in using unseparated biomass to produce value-added plastic materials [16,17]. We demonstrate how we can incorporate unseparated biomass waste into covalent adaptable networks (CANs) to prepare completely reprocessable, recyclable, and easily repairable plastic-like materials with high mechanical properties. Different from the traditional wood-plastic composite materials (WPC) wherein the interactions between biomass phase and insert polymer ph
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