Sustainable Polymers

Economic growth, such as that experienced in developed countries over the last century, cannot continue into the next century nor spread to less developed countries unless industries and societies reduce the amounts of natural resources and energy they consume and the wastes they produce. However, the adoption of renewable polymeric materials in a broad range of applications relies on the development of materials with the same predictable, controllable properties as traditional materials.

Those attributes were frequently obtained in traditional materials through inorganic catalysis and, more recently, controlled radical polymerizations combined with a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of both controlled and uncontrolled, but optimized, reactions. Enzymatic catalysis represents a “greener” route to new degradable materials from renewable feedstocks that should be able to perform in many of the same applications, if their preparation is controlled.

In this project, we will enable industry to optimize existing materials and discover new polymers from renewable feedstocks by providing characterization methods to determine the mechanism of enzymatic catalysis of polymers from renewable feedstocks and synthetic method innovations.

We plan to develop measurement methods needed to enable enzymatically-catalyzed polymerization of materials from renewable feedstocks by controlled synthesis and microfluidic technologies.