Plastics of the future should, ideally for the health of the planet and our own bodies, be composed of biodegradable and safe materials. One particularly important job that plastics perform every day is to make things adhere to a variety of surfaces—like the way sticky parts work on Post-it notes, Scotch tape, or even Band-Aids. At Boston University, Mark Grinstaff and his team of researchers, who are working to find eco-friendly alternatives to plastics, set out to design an adhesive with sticking power but not staying power—a biodegradable material made of entirely naturally derived chemical components that break down after use.
“We are replacing current materials that are not degradable with something better for the environment while still maintaining the properties we expect from a performance standpoint,” says Grinstaff, a BU College of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Translational Research, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of chemistry, and director of the Grinstaff Group. “We can have both, we just have to be smart about how we do it.”
After two years of experimentation, Grinstaff’s team recently unveiled an alternative adhesive in a paper published in Nature Communication. The team says the adhesive’s formula easily adapts to suit a wide range of industrial and medical applications that benefit from sticky materials.
Read more at Boston University
Image Credit: Boston University