Polymer additives for safe-and-sustainable-by-design plastics

Without polymer additives, polymers do not combine to form materials called plastics. Polymer additives are therefore of key importance when it comes to safe and sustainable plastics and plastic applications. Safety for people and the environment during plastic conversion, the production of plastic products, the use phase and the end-of-life phase is particularly important. Furthermore, besides economic advantages and product properties, the ecological impact should be integrated into the product development as a third optimization parameter by implementing a safe-and-sustainable-by-design approach from the very first molecule design phase. Flame retardants must offer both “passive” safety during production, product lifetime and end-of-life as well as “active” safety during very challenging conditions in the event of a fire. Safe and more sustainable flame retardants are still an important R&D topic. New developments in polymer science and plastic material sciences and their transfer to application lead to new opportunities for polymer additives. Vitrimers offer the potential to create a dynamic, covalent network of different types of molecules that is able to change its topology by thermally activated bond-exchange reactions. Polymer additives that only need to be active in a certain product life-cycle phase, e.g. processing additives during plastic conversion and flame retardants during a fire, can be integrated into the covalent network. The safety for humans and the environment during the product use phase increases due to reduced migration tendencies. Furthermore, the possibility of recovering the additives from the covalent network, subsequent to separation during the end-of-life and the recycling phase, makes this system extremely interesting from the perspective of a safe and sustainable circular plastic economy. The transformation toward a circular plastic economy requires completely new classes of polymer additives. For example, plastic recyclates and plastics containing natural materials often have an unpleasant odor and contain unhealthy, volatile substances. This is not only a problem during production – it also severely limits the application range of the plastics concerned. One possible solution is sandwich structures with an odor barrier layer containing special additives which can significantly reduce the release of odors and unhealthy, volatile substances. In this poster, we report our recent developments in the field of flame retardants and odor retardants.