Harvesting Elemental Sulfur as Landfill Waste Towards Novel Polymers by Design – HELP

Polymers are truly shaping today’s world and can be found everywhere, from commodity plastics to high-end technologies. As chemists, this raises an important question: Can we make plastics more sustainable by using resources that can act as an alternative to the current fossil-based solutions, and thus to design a circular economy process from the ground up? Therefore, the aim of the current proposal is to deliver value by diverting waste (e.g., an elemental sulfur, S8, a surplus by-product of natural-gas and petroleum refining operations) from landfills, moving materials up the waste hierarchy and producing quality polymers and materials. Importantly, the polymers and materials thereof are competitively priced and have a smaller environmental footprint than those made with petroleum-based ones. To this end, an underrated multicomponent redox polycondensation of readily available starting materials and S8 will be employed at the interface of organic synthesis and polymer chemistry for furnishing cost-effective novel class of polymers (i.e., poly(thiomalonamide)s) that could not be accessed by any other synthetic methods. The proposed strategy will also enable new opportunities to construct functional materials with application-oriented properties.