Abstract
Humanity faces a serious sustainability challenge on a global scale and many approaches to address sustainability challenges are material-related. Additionally, the design of sustainable materials, such as sustainable plastics is fundamental to many aspects of our economic and environmental future. Although we need plastics in modern society, their high carbon footprint, nonrenewable origins, indiscriminate disposal to the environment in conjunction with their persistence result in ecological damage. This damage is irreparable in the short term and is intensifying. New ideas, advanced understanding and related problem-solving approaches and technologies, have paramount for the plastics industry to shift from its current unsustainable paradigm. Overall, momentum is building for the selection of inherently sustainable material choices manufactured in more benign processes but without compromising established product performance. At the same time, increased focus is placed on product and process innovation that also enables green-house gas avoidance or removal. This is driving the continued need for plastics innovation which is aligned with the circular economy principles of avoiding undesired end-of-life profiles. New plastics need to adapt ideally to existing conversion processes derived from a fungible feedstock to enable a supply chain that can be feasible industrially. This presentation will focus on the rational design of polymers for sustainability. These encompass key factors for polymer sustainability, including (a) the efficient and sustainable conversion of biomass to plastic ingredients, (b) the design and development of high-performance sustainable plastics, elastomers, and thermosets, (c) the design of plastic products with recycling, biodegradation, and composting considerations, and (d) multi-phase and multifunctional polymer systems (polymer blends and composites).