About the Seminar:

Our society today has become highly reliant on plastics for several different applications. Most of these materials come from ever depleting fossil fuel feedstocks and persist in the natural environment for long periods of time due to poor biodegradability and difficult recycling pathways. For these reasons improving the end of life chemical recycling options for these plastics is of utmost importance. To revert these materials back to their starting materials to be reused again not only decreases the accumulation of waste from these materials at their end of life it also decreases the strain on fossil fuel feedstocks to produce these materials.  Nylon materials are a high-performance class of polymer that have been used in many applications due to their high thermal properties and excellent mechanical properties. Yet these same features that give these nylon materials these excellent properties often plague their end-of-life considerations. Nylon-6 has been around since the 1940’s and has an expected market value of $21.5 billion in 2026, thus investigating pathways for depolymerization of Nylon-6 is an important area of focus currently. This presentation will focus on recent work from Prof. Tobin Marks’ group at Northwestern University and their approach to depolymerize Nylon-6 back to its starting monomer using a lanthanum-based catalyst and solvent-free system. As well and some preliminary work done here at Colorado State University to depolymerize Nylon-6 using readily available, cheap potassium-based salts and an investigation of the mechanistic pathway for this depolymerization.