Distinguished Lecture - Plastics for Good

The word plastic is often associated with waste, environmental pollution and excessive use of fossil resources. At the same time, however, the emergence of synthetic polymers over the past century has been key to a vast number of technological advances, and it is hard to envision our society without this class of materials. Moving forward, polymer-based materials will also be essential towards transitioning our society into a sustainable future. Polymers, amongst others, will be indispensable for the development of technologies to support human health and well-being, to help improve food safety and security, and for energy harvesting and storage. The current use of synthetic polymers, however, is not sustainable, and needs to be radically revisited. Transitioning towards a more sustainable (ultimately circular) use of polymers is a great challenge, not only scientifically and technologically.
In this presentation, I will first present some recent work from our laboratory that highlights the use of polymers for energy harvesting and sensing, and for the development of more sustainable agricultural practices. The second part of this presentation will address the challenge towards finding solutions for a more sustainable production and use of polymers. One possible contribution towards a more sustainable polymer economy is to expand the range of renewable, biological resources that are available to produce polymer materials. Lignocellulosic biomass is one example of a biological feedstock that has not yet been fully exploited to produce materials that could complement other biosourced polymers or replace fossil-resource based plastics. Two examples of biomass-derived polymers will be highlighted to underline the potential of this feedstock towards a circular polymer economy.

Bio: Harm-Anton Klok is Full Professor at the Institutes of Materials, and Chemical Sciences and Engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) (Lausanne, Switzerland). He studied chemical technology at the University of Twente (Enschede, The Netherlands) from 1989 to 1993 and received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Ulm (Germany) after working with Martin Möller. After postdoctoral research with David N. Reinhoudt (University of Twente) and Samuel I. Stupp (University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA), he joined the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (Mainz, Germany) in early 1999 as a project leader in the group of Klaus Müllen. In March 2003 he joined EPFL.