Vinyl Polymers End-of-life: Recycling/Composting – ViPER

Organic materials (or plastics) occupy an important place in our society. Due to the large choice of polymers produced and the multiple properties available (in terms of mechanical, thermal or solubilization behavior), they have become indispensable in everyday life as well as in the industrial world.
However, the massive use of plastics today poses a crucial problem of plastics management. One solution to avoid plastic pollution would be to develop new recyclable and/or biodegradable polymers to replace existing ones. This solution has the disadvantage of being long and costly to develop. A simpler and quicker method consists in inserting cleavable functions in the non-degradable polymer chains and in particular in vinyl polymers. Radical copolymerization by ring-opening of cyclic and vinyl monomers allows in particular to obtain fragmentable vinyl copolymers. However, very few studies have been dedicated to the valorization by repolymerization of the obtained oligomers and the biodegradable character of the fragments, in relation with the characteristics of the copolymer before degradation, remains to be studied. This will be the object of this project.