Maria Diaz Galbarriatu1, Julia Sánchez Bodón1, Isabel Moreno Benítez1 and José Luis Vilas Vilela1,2
1Innovative Macromolecular Materials Group (Imacromat), UPV/EHU, 48940, Spain; 2BCmaterials, Basque Centre for Materials, Applications and Nanostructures, 48940, Spain
maria.diazg@ehu.eus
The necessity for replacing petroleum-based non-biodegradable polymers with natural biomass-derived biodegradable materials is of much concern. Indeed, petroleum-based plastics’ pollution must be reduced, and, moreover, there is a shortage of petroleum-based resources due to a natural constraint on petroleum supplies. Hence, sustainable and renewable alternatives to petroleum-based polymers have become an urgent and critical issue for human well-being. In this context, biomass feedstocks can be environmentally benign substitutes for petroleum derived chemicals. For that, phenolic compounds derived from widely available biomass sources represent a potential solution to these sustainability issues and may provide opportunities for less toxic monomer precursors with unique polymer properties. Besides, the principles of Green Chemistry often centre around several ideas, including the use of renewable feedstocks, safe and ecologically friendly materials, and atom economy. So, to fulfil many of the Green Chemistry principles, CO2 can be used for the synthesis of a variety of polymers. Indeed, it is a renewable and abundant C1-feedstock. Moreover, it is inexpensive, as it is generated as a waste gas in enormous quantities, and its extreme stability makes it non-toxic and non-flammable. Nevertheless, nowadays, the necessity to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is an urgent issue to achieve a sustainable society because of global warming and related problems such as abnormal weather, sea level rise, ecological system change, and so on. In this context, the direct synthesis of polymers from CO2 is a hot topic, and therefore, in this work, bio-based polycarbonates have been synthesized from vanillin and syringaldehyde and CO2.