Research could enable creation of longer-lasting plastics

The researchers, led by associate professor Michelle Coote and PhD student Anya Gryn’ova from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Free Radical Chemistry and Biotechnology at ANU, modelled polymer degradation on the supercomputers to discover how to make better, more robust plastics.

Coote said: ’Although plastics have been manufactured for a long time, we have uncovered critical information that will enable longer-lasting plastics to be created, which is important if we want to reduce the amount of plastic waste entering landfill every year.’

Historically, scientists thought that plastics left out in the sun become brittle and fail due to a process called autoxidation, where exposure to light or heat generates free radicals, which are reactive species that attack the polymeric chains in the plastic causing them to rearrange and break. Crucially, each ’broken’ polymer chain was then thought to attack the next polymer chain, leading to a cascading failure that results in visible damage to the plastic.