The rapid growth of plastics production intensifies the planetary crisis of habitat loss, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. To meet the rising demand for plastics, it is essential to promote circular strategies, including recycling and renewable feedstock. At the same time, increasing regulatory pressure on health-related issues, including concern over Bisphenol A (BPA), underscores the need to develop greener and safer monomers. However, developing a sustainable solution from renewable feedstocks has been hindered by the complexity of producing the same conventional polymer from renewable feedstock, as well as the mismatched properties of novel bio-based polymers to achieve the performance of petro-based polymers.
To address these challenges, we report on a sustainable, safer, and degradable rigid diol that can serve as a drop-in replacement for bisphenol-A, while enhancing recyclability in typical epoxy resins. The diglycidyl ether produced from the diol (DGEXO) exhibited properties comparable to conventional systems. When formulated into carbon fiber composites or adhesives, the resin matched the performance of bisphenol analogues while enabling recycling that recovered both carbon fiber or adherends and up to 80% of xylose. In the second part of my thesis, we formulated an innovative ester-based epoxy resin employing only bio-based chemicals from biomass-derived feedstock. We leverage the benefits of highly oxygenated structures in printed circuit board applications, where the constraint framework coming from the developed formulation preserves the thermo-mechanical properties, while the ester-based framework enhances electrical performance. Moreover, the ester-based epoxy resin enables the chemical recycling of 70wt% of the resin and reemployment of the glass fiber. Lastly, we explored the use of ethyl diethoxyacetate (EDEA), an acetal liquid reagent, as a protecting group in place of glyoxylic acid for the production of dimethyl glyoxylate xylose, the monomer used as a starting material for the production of DGEXO. This approach resolved all the viscosity processing issues and achieved up to 80% monomer yield using a heterogeneous catalysis (Amberlyst-15) or a Lewis acid (FeCl3), while enabling EDEA to be recovered and reused in this process. Moreover, a preliminary thermal risk assessment confirmed the robustness of the approach and supported scale-up in a 0.5L batch reactor. In summary, we offered another way to synthesize the di-ester platform, reducing the key limitations (catalyst, viscosity, and reactant recyclability) of the current process to be scaled, without affecting the advantages (neat reaction and one-step synthesis). Moreover, we demonstrated the versatility of DGEXO to act as a drop-in replacement across a broad range of epoxy applications, typically based on amine and anhydride curing, offering a balanced solution that eliminates a major source of toxicity and introduces recyclability without disrupting established properties.