Packaging materials with desired mechanical andbarrier properties and full chemical recyclability

Plastics have become indispensable in modern life and the material of choice in packaging applications, but they have also caused increasing plastic waste accumulation in oceans and landfills. Although there have been continuous efforts to develop biodegradable plastics, the mechanical and/or transport properties of these materials still need to be significantly improved to be suitable for replacing conventional plastic packaging materials. Here we report a class of biorenewable and degradable plastics, based on copolymers of gamma-butyrolactone and its ring- fused derivative, with competitive permeability and elongation at break compared to commodity polymers and superior mechanical and transport properties to those of most promising biobased plastics. Importantly, these materials are designed with full chemical recyclability built into their performance with desired mechanical and barrier properties, thus representing a circular economy approach to plastic packaging materials.This work was supported by the Basque Country Government (IT-618-13), the Spanish Ministry of Innovation and Competitiveness MAT2017-83373-R, and the US National Science Foundation (NSF-1664915) for the work performed at Colorado State University (CSU). The authors also thank the technical and human support provided by Sofia Guezala (SGIker) and Dr Jose Ignacio Miranda (SGIker) of UPV/EHU for the NMR analysis. A.S. thanks the Basque Country Government for the PhD thesis grant and Dr Ravikumar Gowda for technical assistance while performing research at CS