Hybrid Monomer Design Synergizing Property Trade-offs in Developing Polymers for Circularity and Performance

Current search for more sustainable plastics seeks to redesign polymers possessing both chemical recyclability to monomer for a circular plastics economy and desirable performance that can rival or even exceed today's non-recyclable or hard-to-recycle petroleum-based incumbents. However, within a traditional monomer framework it is challenging to optimize, concurrently, contrasting polymerizability/depolymerizability and recyclability/performance properties. Here, we highlight the emerging hybrid monomer design strategy to develop intrinsically circular polymers with tunable performance properties, aiming to unify desired, but otherwise conflicting, properties in a single monomer. Conceptually, this design hybridizes parent monomer pairs of contrasting, mismatching, or matching properties into offspring monomers that not only unify the above-described conflicting properties but also radically alter the resultant polymer properties far beyond the limits of what either parent homopolymers or their copolymers can achieve.