Functional Xylose Polymer Platform for Sustainable Plastics

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The project aims to develop the technologies which will enable the utilisation of sugar molecules derived from thebiological and biochemical engineering treatment of biomass, and transform them into a platform of new polymerswith properties relevant to applications. The approach will also incorporate the end-of-life of these new materials,either by studying their degradation under various conditions, or by feeding them back to biological and biochemicalprocesses.We will focus, amongst the large carbohydrate pool, on D-xylose, as it is abundant, comes from waste and non-ediblecrops, and its price ($0.5/kg) is close to petrochemical feedstocks.Furthermore, xylose is easily modified, in particular via ketal functionalisation, and the ability to work with its furanoseor pyranose form offers multiple monomer possibilities.By creating a platform of functional xylose-based polymers, we will also strive to identify a clear structure/propertyrelationship, which will be exploited to deliver polymers with the desired properties, including for application ascommodity plastic materials.Our work programme will include:1) the optimal (few steps, renewable reagents) and scalable (target scale 100g) synthesis of functionalisedmonomers from xylose, including polar cyclic monomers, cyclic and acyclic olefins;2) the utilization of xylose-rich stream obtained from biological and biochemical treatments of selected biomass (e.g.xylans)3) the controlled polymerisation of these monomers using ring-opening polymerisation (including metathesis), acyclicdiene metathesis polymerisation, and reversible deactivation radical polymerisation methods;4) the complete thermal, mechanical and physical characterisation of the synthesised polymers;5) the formulation of a general structure-property relationship for this new polymer platform;6) the exploitation of these material design rules to develop better polymers;7) the processing and further evaluation of selected polymers as c ommodity plastics8) the utilization of the polymers as feedstock for selected biological and biochemical processes, to explorealternative end-of-life options to thermal or hydrolytic degradation.