Sustainable developments in polyolefin chemistry: Progress, challenges, and outlook

Polyolefins are the largest-scale synthetic plastics and play a key role in modern society. Their production consumes huge amounts of fossil-derived monomer feedstocks, which unfortunately became discarded wastes after use with a very low recycling ratio, causing severe environmental pollution and huge consumption of non-renewable resources. This lack of sustainability could in principle be solved by reusing the waste polyolefins repeatedly as virgin materials or recovering olefin monomers for re-entering the polyolefin cycle. However, it is challenging due to their chemical inertness (C-H and C-C bonds) and lack of degradation sites along the polyolefin chains. Therefore, to make polyolefins more sustainable, degrading or modifying the waste polyolefins on large scales could facilitate their reuse as virgin polyolefins or recovery to polymerizable feedstocks, rethinking the design and synthesis from monomer feedstocks could afford inherently recyclable and thus more sustainable polyolefin or polyolefin-like materials. Given the above, this review will introduce recent progress in the rapidly advancing field: 1) Recycling and up cycling to fuels and other small molecule products, olefin monomer, telechelic products, reprocessable and functional polyolefin materials; 2) Increasing sustainability by the de novo design and synthesis of new degradable and reprocessable polyolefin and polyolefin-like polymers.& COPY; 2023 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Automated summary

Polyolefins, the largest-scale synthetic plastics, face challenges in terms of recycling and sustainability. The chemical inertness and lack of degradation sites make it difficult to reuse waste polyolefins. To address this issue, degrading or modifying waste polyolefins on a large scale can facilitate their reuse, and rethinking the design and synthesis from monomer feedstocks can lead to inherently recyclable and more sustainable polyolefin materials.