IMX Colloquium - Polymers for people and planet - from solving problems in the lab to solving problems in the world

What does it take to bring polymer science from the lab to industrial scale manufacturing? In this talk we will explore the science behind plastic recycling technologies, what you didn't know about the textiles you're wearing, why scaling tough tech (technologies requiring machinery and chemical reactions) is hard but exciting, and how to convince investors to give you startup money to solve the hairy problem of making a 400 million tons of polymers produced per year from plastic waste instead of crude oil. Disruptive "clean" technologies need to not only save resources and emissions, they also need to make money. In the example of PET recycling for polyester textiles and bottles, molecular weight can be built exploiting macrocyclic chemistry, which saves energy by avoiding depolymerization. Impurities such as elastane, dyes, halogens, polyolefins all need to be removed effectively to afford a pure polymer as a drop-in solution for existing industries to adopt quickly. The manufacturing needs to scale and reach price parity with oil-based solutions. Luckily the chemistries and unit operations once developed for oil + gas processing can be used to usher in a new era of polymer manufacturing that is independent of geopolitically and environmentally troublesome crude, which our civilization has a love-hate-relationship with.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41578-021-00407-8 (Circular polymers review) 
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05147-y (Ring-opening polymerization for polyester