Firing bricks and making mortar and cement is very costly, but organic chemists are working on more sustainable alternatives -- focusing on building materials made from waste products. In another move ...

Polyethylene plastics — in particular, the ubiquitous plastic bag that blights the landscape — are notoriously hard to recycle. They’re sturdy and difficult to break down, and if they’re recycled at ...

In November 2019, Eastman Chemical Company announced that it was going to start recycling old polyester carpets from homes and businesses. The firm will use the reclaimed polymer building blocks to ...

One of the most important frontiers in materials chemistry is the architectural control of synthetic materials on the nanometer-scale. Nanometer-scale architecture is primarily responsible for the ...

Chemists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have developed a "smart" polymer that could make industrial curing, 3D ...

As this polymer network is stretched, weaker crosslinking bonds (blue) break more easily than any of the strong polymer strands, making it more difficult for a crack to propagate through the material.

Surprisingly, a material with some more easily broken bonds is harder to tear. Chemists from MIT and Duke University have discovered a counterintuitive way to make polymers stronger. Working with ...

Polyethylene plastics -- single-use bags and general-purpose bottles -- are indestructable forever plastics. That also makes them hard to recycle. Chemists have found a way to break down the polymer - ...