Trojan Horse polymers for a circular economy: New strategy for recyclable polyolefins

It is hard to imagine our daily lives without plastics made out of polyolefins. Unfortunately, practical methods for recycling of polyolefins are lacking. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, a research team has now introduced a new approach for making novel polyolefins that can be chemically deconstructed and re-polymerized without a loss of quality. The secret to the method is masked double bonds introduced to the polymer chain by means of a so-called "Trojan horse" functional group in the polymer chain.