Browsing: Environment

OGDEN, Utah – If the idea that “misery loves company” is any solace, recyclers can take comfort that the container availability, freight costs and shipping date delays plaguing them are being shared across seemingly all business sectors. A Jan. 25 online article by the Washington Post refers to “disrupted global supply chains” with symptoms that include “fresh shipping headaches” that are delaying United States exports, “crimping domestic manufacturing and threatening higher prices for American consumers.” “The cost of shipping a container of goods has risen by 80 percent since early November and has nearly tripled over the past year, according to the Freightos…

OGDEN, Utah – Closed-loop recycling offers the opportunity to mitigate plastic waste through reversible polymer construction and deconstruction. Although examples of chemical recycling of polymers are known, few have been applied to materials derived from abundant commodity olefinic monomers, which are the building blocks of ubiquitous plastic resins. Here we describe a [2+2] cycloaddition/oligomerization of 1,3-butadiene to yield a previously unrealized telechelic microstructure of (1,n′-divinyl)oligocyclobutane. This material is thermally stable, has stereoregular segments arising from chain-end control, and exhibits high crystallinity even at low molecular weight. Exposure of the oligocyclobutane to vacuum in the presence of the pyridine(diimine) iron precatalyst…