Novel polyesters from renewable resources

Bio-based polyesters attract a lot of interest with regard to sustainable development as alternatives to polymers derived from oil. Aliphatic polyesters are biodegradable and frequently biocompatible. Thanks to these properties, they have numerous applications in daily life such as packaging but also in niche markets (biomedical devices). Ring-opening co-polymerization between epoxides and cyclic anhydrides produces polyesters with variable architectures. This synthetic approach is promising thanks to the wide availability of monomers. A huge asset of the copolymerization is to use monomers from biomass. Epoxides and anhydrides can indeed be obtained from natural resources such as carbohydrates, fatty acids and terpenes