While plastics are very useful on their own, they can be much stronger when reinforced and mixed with a range of fibers. Not surprisingly, this includes the thermoplastic polymers which are commonly ...

Hundreds of millions of tons of single-use plastic end up in landfills every year, and even the small percentage of plastic that gets recycled can’t last forever. But our group of materials scientists ...

Hundreds of millions of tons of single-use plastic ends up in landfills every year, and even the small percentage of plastic that gets recycled can’t last forever. But our group of materials ...

Little pieces of polymer plastic. The plastics industry is trying to be as clean as possible, but it has a lot of obstacles to overcome. The late great comedian George Carlin once said that perhaps ...

ORNL's invention may change plastic's environmental fate by rearranging polymeric building blocks to customize the properties of plastics. Molecular subunits link to produce polymer chains that can ...

One reason plastic waste persists in the environment is because there’s not much that can eat it. The chemical structure of most polymers is stable and different enough from existing food sources that ...

Scientists have unveiled a glass–plastic hybrid that bends instead of shattering, upending long‑held assumptions about how ...

Most materials have an inherent capacity to handle heat. Plastic, for instance, is typically a poor thermal conductor, whereas materials like marble move heat more efficiently. If you were to place ...

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 - ...

For Frank Leibfarth, focussing on reactivity and selectivity helps him bridge the gap between fundamental and applied ...

Oliver's store recommends traditional wood or wicker furniture only for covered porches or patios. Even wrought iron, a backyard standby, has higher maintenance needs. For full sun use, the polymer ...

To upcycle the polymers of discarded plastics, chemists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory invented a way to generate new macromolecules with more valuable properties than those of the starting material ...