A new kind of plastic can endure the intense heat of extreme combustion without melting into gunk. Researchers in South Korea ...

Plastic waste has long outpaced our ability to deal with it, largely because the most common packaging plastics are hard to ...

Not all polymers are plastics, but all plastics are polymers. And organic (carbon-based) polymer plastics, known mostly for being insulators, in some cases make excellent conductors and semiconductors ...

A polymer is a chemical compound that contains a large number of identical molecular repeating units. A plastic material is a polymer, typically modified with additives, which can be molded or shaped ...

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

There’s a great future in plastics. A new kind of plastic can, when exposed to the right chemicals, break down into the same basic building blocks that it came from and be rebuilt again and again. The ...

In what could form the basis of petroleum-free plastics that are both entirely recyclable and biodegradable, chemists have found a polymer that can be synthesized into useful materials and then broken ...

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 ...

As useful as it is, plastic isn't the most environmentally-friendly material. Our constant use of the stuff has seen huge amounts of it lodged in Arctic sea ice, penetrating to the deepest parts of ...

IR spectroscopy or infrared spectroscopy is used for identifying a group of chemical species in a wide range of sample materials. This technique is mainly utilized for classifying organic chemical ...