Abstract
A sustainable closed-loop manufacturing would become reality if commodity plastics can be upcycled into higher-performance materials with facile processability. Such circularity will be realized when the upcycled plastics can be (re)processed into custom-designed structures through energy/resource-efficient additive manufacturing methods, especially by approachable and scalable fused filament fabrication (FFF). Here, we introduce a circular model epitomized by upcycling a prominent thermoplastic, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) into a recyclable, robust adaptive dynamic covalent network (ABS-vitrimer) (re)printable via FFF. The full FFF processing of ABS-vitrimer overcomes the major challenge of (re)printing cross-linked materials and produces stronger, tougher, solvent-resistant three-dimensional objects directly reprintable and separable from unsorted plastic waste. This study thus offers an imminently adoptable approach for advanced manufacturing toward the circular plastics economy.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | eabn6006 |
| Journal | Science Advances |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 22 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 2022 |
Funding
We thank C. Bowland for the initial trial on a compression test, and we thank J. Damron for conducting the solid-state NMR experiment. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle LLC under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The U.S. government retains, and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http:// energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan). This research was sponsored by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Oak Ridge National Laboratory managed by UT-Battelle LLC for the U.S. DOE. Solid-state NMR and dissolution experiments are supported by the U.S. DOE, Office of Science, Materials Sciences, and Engineering Division.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| DOE Public Access Plan | |
| U.S. Government | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| Office of Science | |
| Oak Ridge National Laboratory | |
| Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering | |
| UT-Battelle | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |
