Marriage of Furans and Vegetable Oils through Click Chemistry for the Preparation of Macromolecular Materials: A Succinct Review

The inevitable future scarcity of fossil resources, coupled with sustainability considerations, have stimulated the use of renewable resources for material synthesis, and highly efficient polymerization methods that meet the requirements of green chemistry have drawn attention to fatty acid-based polymers. Additionally, the polymerization of furan monomers and the exploitation of some of the chemical peculiarities of the furan heterocycle have generated a wide diversity of macromolecular materials. A novel approach is reviewed here, calling upon the combined use of both vegetable oils and their derivatives together with furans, as a promising technique to obtain new materials from two renewable resources. This succinct review provides an overview of the present strategies to produce linear and crosslinked thermally reversible polyadducts through Diels-Alder and other click reactions.