A new way to make plastic polymers, reported by Swiss scientists in the British journal nature communications on Thursday, could yield bioplastics that have similar properties to traditional plastics but are more sustainable in just 30 minutes. This study shows that the bioplastics based on renewable resources, bottle grade polyethylene furanate, can be obtained in a very short time.

In 2018, the United Nations environment programme first focused on the problem of disposable plastic pollution and designated this year's theme of world environment day "plastic warfare quick fix" because our planet is surrounded by plastic. More than 79,000 tons of plastic waste are currently floating in the vast Marine plastic accumulation zone between California and Hawaii. The United Nations environment agency says without restrictions, the oceans will have more plastic waste than fish by 2050.

Compared with conventional plastics, sustainable polymers usually have poor performance, including discoloration and thermal degradation, which are unable to adapt to specific daily applications. Scientists believe that polyvinylfuranate has some potential, but it begins to degrade after it is formed because it takes so long to react in production.

This time, massimo mobidalli and his colleagues at the federal institute of technology in Zurich, Switzerland, proposed an open-loop polymerization method to form a long straight chain of bottle-grade polyvinylfuranate. According to the method, a high boiling point solvent was used to mix the initial material, the smaller ring polyvinylfuranate chain, with the tin base catalyst. Once the polymer product begins to form, it melts under reaction conditions, facilitating initial material transformation.

The team said the method could be used to complete the reaction within 30 minutes, creating polyvinylfuranate with the required properties and minimizing degradation and discoloration problems.

At the present stage, people's production and life are very dependent on plastic, so it is necessary to find a sustainable plastic "substitute". However, other sustainable plastics, including bioplastics, will be chosen by users before they can replace the currently used plastic. It will take scientists to help make the "alternative" work.